The Weight of Leaving

Margaret stood in the kitchen, the cardboard box at her feet like an open wound. Twenty-three years of marriage reduced to whatever she could carry. She picked up the plastic orange pillbox from the counter—his vitamin D supplements, the ones he swore would fix everything that was broken between them.

"You need to take care of yourself, Mag," David had said last night, his voice gentle in that way that made her want to scream. "Here's your vitamin."

She'd swallowed it dry, like medicine, like absolution.

The bear clock on the wall ticked toward noon. They'd bought it in Colorado on that trip where they'd pretended everything was fine. The bear's glass eyes had watched them eat dinner in silence for six years, watched them sleep in separate bedrooms for three. It had borne witness to their slow, quiet death.

She remembered the way his hands used to feel on her back, how they would find each other in the dark like animals seeking warmth. Now they circled each other in the hallway, careful not to touch, not to bruise what was already broken.

David appeared in the doorway, holding an orange. He'd always peeled them in one long spiral, a trick that had charmed her when they were twenty-three and stupid with hope. He offered it to her now, a peace offering, a question.

"Your flight's at four," he said.

Margaret took the orange, its weight impossibly heavy in her palm. She looked at the bear on the wall, at the man she'd loved and hated and outgrown, at the life she was dismantling piece by piece. She thought about how love could bear so much weight before it simply collapsed under its own gravity.

"I know," she said, and put the orange in her pocket, where it would leave a stain on her dress like a bruise, like a beginning.