What We Bear

The single strand of hair wrapped around her iPhone charging port like a dark secret. Elena stared at it through blurred vision—the coarse silver-gray that could only be his. Not her husband's. The other one's.

She should delete it. Instead, she found herself pressing it to her nose, inhaling the ghost of cedar and stale office coffee. Three weeks since Marcus moved to Denver, and still she was haunted by parts of him left behind.

The iPhone buzzed in her palm. David.

"Running late," she typed back. "Meeting ran over."

The lie came easily now. Too easily. She wondered if David could smell the guilt on her the way she could smell Marcus on this hair.

Her thumb hovered over her contact list—Marcus, listed under M for "Marketing Guy" in case David ever looked. Which he wouldn't. He trusted her with the terrifying certainty of a man who'd never been cheated on.

She pressed the hair between her thumb and forefinger until it hurt. They were what they bore, her mother used to say. Secrets, regrets, the weight of lives unlived. At forty-two, Elena was bearing plenty.

Outside, the Alaska morning pressed against her hotel window—all bruised purple clouds and mountains that refused to apologize for their majesty. She'd come for the photography workshop, something to reignite the spark that marriage and middle management had dimmed. Instead, she'd reignited something else entirely.

Her phone chimed again. Marcus this time: "Thinking of you."

The bear appeared in the parking lot then—a grizzly, massive as an SUV, ambling between cars like it owned the place. Elena watched through glass as it sniffed at a guest's discarded breakfast. The bear didn't apologize either. It just took what it needed.

She looked at the hair, at the phone, at the bear.

Then she opened the window and let the hair catch on the wind. Watched it tumble toward the bear, toward the mountains, toward whatever came next.

Some burdens, she decided, you just had to put down.