What We Bear

The orange sunset burned through the kitchen window, catching on the dust motes dancing in the silence between us. Marcus stood at the stove, his back to me, stirring something that smelled faintly of burned garlic and desperation.

"You should sit," he said, not turning around. "Dinner's almost ready."

I pulled out a chair and watched the way his shoulders curved forward, like a question mark that had forgotten what it was asking. We hadn't spoken in three months—not since the hospital, not since the funeral, not since I'd said things I couldn't take back and he'd heard things he couldn't forgive. Now here we were, pretending this wilted spinach salad and overcooked pasta could fix what we'd broken.

"I don't even like spinach," I said, and the words came out more bitter than I intended.

Marcus finally turned. His eyes were the same familiar brown, but something behind them had gone distant, like a house with all the lights still on but nobody home. "I know," he said quietly. "I know what you like, Elena. I know you hate cooked spinach. I know you take your coffee black and your apologies reluctant and you haven't slept through the night since—"

He stopped himself. The air between us grew thick with everything we weren't saying.

"Then why cook it?"

"Because I thought maybe you'd changed." He set a plate down in front of me, steam rising from the greens like breath in winter. "Because I thought maybe I had changed. Because I thought maybe we could both bear to sit at the same table again without pretending we were still friends."

I looked down at my plate. The spinach lay there like collapsed ideas, like all the times we should have spoken and didn't. My throat tightened.

"I miss you," I whispered. "I hate you, but I miss you."

Marcus sat across from me, his own dinner untouched. The orange light deepening to bruised purple across his face.

"That's the thing about grief," he said finally. "It makes you remember what you can't bear. And it makes you forget what you can't afford to lose."