The Things We Carry

The bear came at dusk, a shadow separating itself from the treeline behind the padel courts. I should have been afraid. Instead, I stood there with my racket dangling from my wrist, thinking how ridiculous it was that my ex had been right about the hiking trail all along.

"Take Bear," she'd said during the division of assets, gesturing to our golden retriever like he was a piece of furniture. "You need someone to talk to, even if he won't understand you."

Bear sat beside me now, tail thumping against the chain-link fence, utterly unconcerned. The actual bear paused, snuffing the air, then continued on its way toward the river. Some animals knew when they were being watched by someone too empty to be a threat.

My iPhone buzzed in my pocket—the fourth time tonight. Maria again. She'd been trying to reach me since I cancelled dinner, citing work. The truth was, I'd sat on my couch for three hours watching the baseball playoffs, unable to will myself into motion. The game had gone into extra innings, a fitting metaphor for a life that refused to end cleanly.

"Good boy," I said to the dog, though he hadn't done anything but exist in that uncomplicated way dogs do. We started walking back to the car. The padel club was empty now, the courts quiet under the floodlights. I'd joined on impulse two months after she left, hoping the rhythm of something—anything—would fill the hours between work and sleep.

It hadn't worked. But then, nothing had.

The phone lit up with a message: *I'm worried about you. Can we talk?*

I typed and deleted three responses before dropping the phone into my bag. Some things needed to be said in person, or not at all. Bear pressed his warm weight against my leg as we walked to the car. Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I'd call her back. Tomorrow I'd figure out what it meant to start over, or at least to stop waiting for a life that wasn't coming back.

The bear emerged from the trees again on our return loop, closer this time. I watched it through the windshield, thinking how strange it was that we named our most fearsome things after creatures that mostly just wanted to be left alone. The engine turned over. In the rearview, the bear watched us go, then turned back toward the river.