The Geometry of Loss

Margaret stood before her mother's collection of ceramic figurines arranged on the mantelpiece—a porcelain **cat** mid-pounce, a delicate **pyramid** of unlikely stability, a tiny **baseball** player frozen in eternal windup. Dust motes floated in the afternoon light like suspended grief.

"You're the walking dead," her ex-husband had said during their last conversation, his voice thick with that familiar condescension. "You move through life like a **zombie**, Margie. Nothing touches you."

She'd wanted to argue, to scream that he was wrong, that she felt everything too much. Instead, she'd packed her things in silence. Some truths don't deserve the dignity of response.

Now, three months later, sorting through her childhood home after her mother's passing, Margaret understood the accusation better. The exhaustion wasn't about numbness—it was about the sheer weight of carrying decades of unexpressed emotion. She was thirty-eight, newly divorced, newly orphaned, running a division at a company that had stopped caring about its people years ago. The corporate ladder was just a **pyramid** scheme of ambition disguised as purpose.

Her phone buzzed—David, again. They'd met at a grief support group two weeks ago. He was kind, funny, maybe too available. Margaret wasn't ready for whatever this was, but she wasn't ready to be alone either.

She picked up the ceramic **cat**, her mother's favorite. The old woman had kept it on her desk through thirty years of teaching, through Margaret's father's death, through her own breast cancer. "Stubbornness," her mother had called it when explaining her survival. "I refused to die before I was good and ready."

Margaret set the cat down carefully. Maybe that's what David saw in her—the same stubborn refusal to lie down and accept whatever numbness the world offered. Maybe that's what her ex-husband had mistaken for being a **zombie**.

Outside, children played **baseball** in the street, their shouts drifting through the open window—sounds of pure, unselfconscious joy. Margaret realized she couldn't remember the last time she'd felt something that simple.

She texted David back: "Dinner tomorrow?"

Then she called her boss and said what she'd been meaning to say for years. The walking dead don't make bold moves. The living do.