The Weight of Wet Wool

The fedora sat heavy on Eleanor's head, a damp wool weight she couldn't bring herself to remove. Three hours at Marcus's memorial service, and still she was running—first from the condolences, then from his sister's knowing gaze, and now from the rain that had begun to sheet down the funeral home's windows.

"You were his best friend," his mother had said, squeezing Eleanor's hand with desperate warmth. The word had caught in her throat like fishbone.

She remembered the summer they'd gone swimming in that murky quarry behind the abandoned mill, twenty years old and convinced they were immortal. Marcus had stripped to his boxers and cannonballed into the darkness, emerging slick as a seal, grinning with those teeth too perfect for his cynical mouth. "Come in, El," he'd called. "The water's fine." She'd hesitated on the rocky shore, her secret pressing against her ribs like a second heart.

She never told him. Some mornings she'd wake from dreams where he kissed her and spend the whole day running—errands, gym, any movement to burn off the wanting. Other times she'd catch him looking at her across a crowded bar and think: maybe.

The cancer had been fast. Six months from diagnosis to the voicemail he left her, voice thin with morphine: "You never did learn to swim, did you?" Eleanor had played it twenty times before understanding.

Now, standing alone beside his grave as the other mourners dispersed, she finally took off the hat. Her hair flattened against her skull. The rain felt like his fingers, cold and insistent, trailing down her cheeks. She didn't wipe them away.

"I'm learning," she whispered to the wet earth. "Marcus, I'm finally learning."