The Things We Bear

Marcus had been my best friend since we were seven, before the internet made secrets obsolete and before the weight of adult life could press against your palm like a prayer stone. Now he sat across from me at the dive bar where we'd conducted every major conversation of our thirties, his iPhone face-up on the sticky table, lighting up every thirty seconds with messages he wouldn't check. His wife was in labor with their first child.

"You should be there," I said, not for the first time.

"She said she wants her mother, not me. She said my breathing stresses her out." He laughed without humor. "The things we bear, right?"

I thought about the bear I'd encountered on my camping trip last month—how it had stood on its hind legs, massive and impossible, and I'd understood in that moment what true fear felt like. What it meant to be small.

"You know what Lisa told me yesterday?" Marcus said, finally turning his phone face-down. "She said she wished she'd married you instead."

The air between us shifted. Lisa—my ex-fiancée, the woman Marcus had started dating three weeks after she left me at the altar. The woman whose wedding I'd attended, smiling so hard my face cramped, because that's what friends do. They bear the unbearable.

"She was emotional," I said. "Hormonal."

"She meant it." His palm pressed against the table, spreading like a stain. "She said she thinks about what her life would have been. That she made the wrong choice."

I looked at my own phone, dark and dormant. I could have shown him the texts I'd received from Lisa at 2 AM last month. The ones asking if I was happy. The ones I'd deleted but still dreamed about. The burden of being the one left behind had become something else—become the weight of being the possibility that haunted another woman's marriage.

"You need to go to the hospital," I said. "Now."

"And what? Pretend I don't know?"

"You bear it," I said, the word tasting like ash. "That's what we do. We bear the things that would break us if we put them down."

He stood up, leaving his phone on the table. Outside, a siren wailed toward the hospital district. I ordered another drink and wondered which of us would bear this longer—him with his certainty, or me with mine.