The Lightning Split Our Sky

The bearish quality of grief—that's what she'd written in the margins of my baseball manuscript. I'd found the note three months after Elena left, tucked inside the brim of the old Mets hat she'd given me on our first anniversary. The hat still smelled faintly of her perfume, jasmine and rain.

I sat in the orange glow of the streetlamp outside our apartment, watching lightning fork across the July sky. Each flash illuminated the For Sale sign in the yard, its metal post rusted at the base. The realtor had suggested I remove the baseball glove collection from the living room wall—too masculine, she'd said, too aggressively nostalgic. But the gloves stayed, lined up like small leather animals hibernating through a winter I couldn't seem to end.

Elena had always claimed I couldn't bear criticism without retreating into myself. She wasn't wrong. When she'd said my baseball memoir was self-indulgent, I'd spent three nights in the guest room, emerging only to brew coffee and pretend nothing was wrong. That pattern had repeated itself for five years—her pointing out something true, me disappearing, both of us pretending the distance wasn't growing.

The lightning struck closer now, the thunder following like an afterthought. I remembered watching baseball with her father that last Thanksgiving, his orange turkey-stained fingers gripping a beer, explaining why the designated hitter ruined the sport's purity. Elena had caught my eye across the table, that private smile we'd shared a thousand times, the one that said: you're doing this, you're bearing this, for me.

But I wasn't. Not really.

A bear emerged from the woods behind the apartment complex—a real one, wandering down from the mountains, drawn by the scent of garbage. It moved with a heavy, deliberate grace, its fur matted with summer dust. I watched it through the kitchen window, thinking how easily it could tear through the door, through all the defenses I'd built.

The bear sniffed the garbage bins, then moved on, indifferent to my solitude. Some things, I realized, don't need to be destroyed to be abandoned.

I took off the Mets hat and set it on the counter. Then I picked up the phone and called Elena. Lightning flashed again, and for the first time in months, I didn't count the seconds until the thunder arrived.