The Weight of Living

Forty-two and starting over. Maya sat on the floor of her half-empty apartment, the coaxial cable snaking across the hardwood like a question she couldn't answer. The technician had left an hour ago, and now she had three hundred channels of nothing to watch.

Her phone buzzed. David.

She stared at his name—how three months of shared Sunday mornings, his terrible coffee, the way he hummed while cooking, had dissolved into this: a notification on a screen she couldn't bring herself to answer.

Maya stood and walked to the window. Below, the apartment complex pool glowed blue-white in the dusk. Two teenagers were swimming, their laughter floating up like something from another life. She remembered swimming in Lake Michigan with David last September, how the cold had shocked them both breathless, how they'd stumbled to shore shivering and kiss-raw, and she'd thought: *This. This is what people wait for.*

Now the lake was still frozen somewhere under spring's uncertain thaw, and David was sleeping with someone named Rebecca.

The cable box blinked. 12:00 AM. It had never successfully set its time.

"You can't bear it forever," her sister had said over wine yesterday, using that word—their mother's word, the word that had powered them through her funeral and their father's decline. *We bear what we must.* But Maya was tired of bearing. She wanted to lay it down, whatever it was—the grief, the disappointment, the quiet accumulation of losses that came with being alive this long.

She opened the window. The swimming teenagers had gone. The pool was just water again, reflecting nothing but its own artificial light.

Maya's phone buzzed again. Another text from David: *I still have your sweater.*

She typed: *Keep it.* Then deleted the words.

Then: *I don't want it back.* Deleted again.

Finally: *Come by tomorrow. 7.* Send.

She stood there a long time, until the cable box's blinking steadied into something that looked almost like time passing, almost like forward motion, almost like the kind of thing you could trust yourself to follow.