The Burden We Bear

Maya found the bottle of vitamin D supplements in her coworker's drawer while hunting for a stapler. The irony made her laugh — Brendan, who'd just been diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma, hoarding vitamins like they were some kind of cosmic bargaining chip.

"You're going to lose your hair," he'd told her two weeks ago, not unkindly, when she'd confessed about her mother's stroke and the crushing weight of becoming everything to everyone. "The stress, I mean. Not the cancer. Though that'll do it too."

They weren't friends, not really. Just two people who'd gravitated toward the same smoking balcony outside their glass tower, watching the city pretend the sun came out at 5 AM. But Brendan had become something else now — a mirror reflecting her own mortality, sharpened to a terrible edge.

"It's a lot to bear," he said today, as she handed him the stapler and pretended she hadn't seen the vitamins. His eyes were the color of weathered brass, holding a depth of acceptance she couldn't fathom. "The being alive part. That's the hard bit. The dying is just paperwork."

Maya touched her own hair then, thick and brown and oblivious, and felt an sudden, irrational urge to shave it all off. To bear witness. To something.

"Take the vitamins," he said, following her gaze. "Maybe they'll work for you."

She left them on his desk. That evening, she sat on her balcony and drank wine straight from the bottle, thinking about how we become friends with the dying only when we recognize ourselves in them, how we're all just bargaining with a universe that stopped listening years ago.

The vitamins were still on his desk when she came in Monday. His chair was empty.

She pocketed them on her way out. It wasn't stealing. It was a promise to bear the weight he'd left behind, if only for a little while.