The Things We Carry

The spinach had gone slimy in the crisper drawer, much like the rest of Marc's life lately. Three weeks past its expiration date, the bag sat there accusingly every time he reached for a beer. He should throw it out. He should do a lot of things.

His iPhone lit up across the counter — Sarah. Again. The fifth time today. He watched the screen pulse with that practiced indifference he'd been cultivating since the funeral, since she'd looked him in the eyes across the appetizers and said she couldn't do this anymore, couldn't be his person through whatever this was turning into.

"I'm worried about you," she'd said then, and now, apparently, in the form of unanswered calls and increasingly desperate texts.

Marc found himself pulling on his grandfather's fedora — the hat was ridiculous, really, something a would-be hipster wore ironically, but it had smelled like pipe tobacco and old books and the one childhood summer he'd spent learning to tie proper knots at the lake house. Now it just smelled like Marc's unwashed hair and the vague must of a man who'd stopped caring whether his apartment crossed the threshold into uninhabitable.

The doorbell rang.

He considered not answering. He was very good at not answering things these days.

"Marc?" Sarah's voice through the thin wood, muffled but unmistakable. "I know you're in there. Your car's here."

He opened the door.

She stood there with a Tupperware container and that look she got when she was simultaneously furious and heartsick, her eyes searching his face for the version of him that still made jokes at dinner parties and remembered to floss.

"You look like shit," she said.

"I've been busy."

"Doing what? Cultivating new life forms in your refrigerator?"

She pushed past him into the apartment, and he didn't stop her. She set the container on his cluttered coffee table — she'd brought soup, obviously, she always brought soup when things fell apart — and turned to face him with arms crossed.

"We used to be friends, Marc. Actual friends. The kind who told each other things."

"People change."

"No," she said, and her voice cracked. "People get sad. And sometimes they need help digging themselves out."

She gestured at the apartment, at the half-empty bottles and the stacked mail and the life in suspended animation. "Let me help you clean up. Just today. Please."

He thought about saying no. He thought about closing the door and returning to the carefully constructed numbness that had become his default state. But then she reached out and squeezed his hand, and something in his chest cracked open.

"The spinach," he heard himself say. "It's probably toxic by now."

She laughed, a real laugh that crinkled the corners of her eyes. "We'll start with the hazardous materials first. Deal?"

"Deal."

Later, as they scrubbed his refrigerator and talked about nothing and everything, Marc caught his own reflection in the darkened window and saw something he hadn't seen in months: the possibility that he might eventually be okay. Not today, maybe not tomorrow. But someday.

The spinach went into the trash. The hat stayed on his head. And somewhere in the space between cleanup and conversation, he started to remember how to want things again.