The Weight of Living

Maya stood at the edge of the lake, watching the dark **water** lap against the shore. Three months since Sarah's funeral, and still she expected to turn around and see her standing there, smirking at Maya's inability to just be still, to just grieve without turning it into a project.

"You **bear** the weight of everything," Sarah had told her during their last real conversation, the one where the word "hospice" had finally been spoken aloud. "Even things that aren't yours to carry."

Now, in the silence of the cabin they'd bought together — the one with the mortgage Maya couldn't afford alone — that sentence played on an endless loop. She'd become a human **sphinx**, riddle without answer, guard of her own mythology. The grief felt ancient, monumental, carved in stone.

Her phone buzzed. Another reminder from her sister: "Have you eaten? Are you taking your **vitamin** D? The doctor said seasonal depression would be worse this year."

Maya had laughed when she read that text the first time, hours after Sarah died. Now the humor had curdled into something else. Vitamin D. As if the absence could be solved with supplements. As if the hollow space where a person used to be could be filled with anything but more absence.

She walked back to the cabin, her feet cold in the damp sand. Inside, on the kitchen counter, the orange bottle stood sentinel. She uncapped it, dry-swallowed a pill like defiance.

The **sphinx** had asked Oedipus what walked on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening. The answer: man. But the real riddle was how to keep walking when someone who'd made you whole was gone, when your four legs became two, then one, then none at all.

Maya **bore** it anyway.