What We Bear

The last text you sent me sits on my phone like a **vitamin** I keep forgetting to take—small, supposedly good for me, impossible to swallow. You'd written: "You don't have to **bear** this alone." I'd laughed then, alone in my apartment, knowing that bearing things alone was exactly what I'd been training for my entire life.

Three months later, I'm standing in the supplement aisle again, staring at bottles promising happiness in gelatin capsules. The fluorescent lights hum overhead like **lightning** trapped in glass, and I wonder if you were right. If there's some version of this life where I reach out. Where I let myself be the kind of person who has friends who show up with soup and bad movies when everything falls apart.

But I've spent forty years constructing this careful architecture of self-sufficiency. My mother taught me that neediness is unattractive. My last lover taught me that vulnerability gets weaponized. So I built walls and called them boundaries, learned to say "I'm fine" until I believed it myself.

Now there's you, with your casual offers of help, your text messages that sit unanswered because I don't know the script for this. Do I say "yes, come over" and let you see the dishes in my sink, the way I've been sleeping in my clothes? Do I admit that the silence in my apartment has gotten so loud it's become a kind of company?

The automatic doors slide open and a woman walks in with a child, both of them laughing about something I'll never understand. In their reflection in the glass, I catch my own face—tired, alone, increasingly strange to myself. And suddenly I understand: the **lightning** strike isn't supposed to be the disaster. It's supposed to be the illumination. The moment you finally see what's been there all along.

I pick up my phone. I type: "I think I need that soup now."

Then I delete it and type: "I don't want to bear this alone anymore."

Then I delete that too and just send: "Yes."

Sometimes the bravest thing is letting yourself be the kind of person who needs people. Sometimes that's the only **vitamin** that actually works.