The Weight We Bear

The restaurant was too expensive for a Tuesday, but Marcus needed to believe he still had standards. He watched the candlelight flicker against the wine bottle—half-empty, like everything else in his life.

"I'm moving out," Sarah said, not looking up from her phone. Her thumb scrolled, scrolled, scrolled. The blue light from her iPhone reflected in eyes that used to know him.

Marcus nodded. He'd known it was coming. The way she'd started leaving her spinach to wilt in the crisper, forgotten. The way she stopped asking about the deals collapsing around him at the firm. The way she now locked the bathroom door when she showered.

"You're sleeping with someone," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I'm sleeping with myself, Marcus. For the first time in twenty years."

He laughed, bitter and sharp. Outside, the first summer storm of the year was breaking. Lightning cracked the sky, illuminating their wedding photo on the phone face-down on the table. They were younger then. Lighter. Before the promotions and the mortgage and the slow erosion of everything they'd promised to be.

He thought about the bear he'd seen in Yellowstone on their anniversary trip—that thick, lumbering creature that had emerged from the woods, wild and incomprehensible. Sarah had held his hand then. Now, she checked her messages.

"Do you remember," he said, "when you told me you wanted to be the person who grew old screaming at the ocean?"

She finally looked at him. "I was drunk."

"You were honest."

"I was twenty-four, Marcus. I didn't know what honesty cost."

The waiter came with the check. They split it, down to the cent. That's what their marriage had become: accounting, resentment, the careful tally of who gave what.

He walked to his car alone. The storm had passed, leaving everything wet and electric. He started the engine and sat there, engine idling, wondering what he'd bear tomorrow. Wondering if there was anything left that still had teeth.

The spinach in his own fridge was probably turning brown by now. That's what happened when you stopped paying attention to the things that were supposed to nourish you.