The Weight of What We Carry

The **palm** of my hand still tingles where that stranger at the party traced its lines last Saturday. "You're carrying someone else's burden," she'd said, her nail snagging on the life line that curved deeper than it should. I'd laughed, dismissed it as party trick fodder, but three days later, I found myself staring at the bottle of **vitamin** D supplements on my nightstand—Marcus's brand, not mine. He'd been dead six months, and I was still taking his vitamins.

Marcus had been a **bull** of a man—stubborn, forceful, impossible to redirect once he'd set his course. He'd bulldozed through our marriage the same way he'd bulldozed through business deals, leaving emotional wreckage he refused to acknowledge. "I'm just passionate," he'd say, when passion was really just domination dressed up in prettier clothes. I'd learned to make myself smaller around him, like the **goldfish** in the cracked bowl on his desk, swimming endless circles in murky water, forgetting anything beyond the glass walls.

The palm reader's words had lodged under my skin like a splinter. She hadn't needed to tell me whose burden I carried. It was in the way I still checked my phone for messages that would never come, in the way I apologized for taking up space, in the way I swallowed vitamins that made me nauseous because they were *his* brand.

I poured the pills into the toilet. Watched them dissolve, tiny white ships sinking into darkness. Something loosened in my chest—something that had been tight since Marcus's heart gave out during one of his "passionate" speeches about market expansion.

That evening, I bought a new goldfish—slender, silver thing with fins like silk paper. I named her Liberty. She swam in clean, clear water, unburdened by the ghosts of fish who'd come before. I sat by her bowl, palm pressed against the cool glass, and for the first time in years, the circles I walked were ones I'd chosen myself.