What We Bear

The bottle of vitamin D sat on the kitchen counter like a small accusation. Sarah had started taking them after her mother died, a daily ritual of something she could control when everything else felt like it was unraveling. That was three months ago. Now, the pills remained while she was gone.

Marcus stood at the window, watching the storm gather over the city. Lightning cracked the sky in jagged veins, illuminating the empty apartment where their ten-year marriage had slowly extinguished itself—not with dramatic arguments or betrayed promises, but with the quieter violence of neglect, of two people who simply forgot how to be seen by each other.

He had been the one to bear the weight of their shared silence, carrying it like a chronic ache. Sarah had called it his "reserve strength," the thing that made him reliable, steady. What she'd never understood was that his reserve was just fear wearing a better suit.

"You don't have to be the strong one all the time," she'd told him once, early on, when he'd refused to cry at his father's funeral. He'd nodded, filed it away as something she'd say about him. But eventually, she'd stopped saying anything at all.

The lightning struck closer now, and he watched his reflection in the glass—fifty years old, alone in a kitchen full of vitamins he couldn't bring himself to throw away. Some part of him was still waiting for her to walk back through the door, to finally say the thing she'd never said: that his strength wasn't strength at all.

He reached for the vitamin bottle, twisted the child-proof cap until it clicked open. Dry, tasteless pills that promised to fix what sunlight couldn't. He swallowed one without water, thinking about how Sarah used to joke that he was like a bear—hibernating through emotions, only emerging when he was damn good and ready.

The joke had stopped being funny years ago.

Another lightning flash, and for a moment, he saw it all clearly: the bear wasn't strength at all. It was just something you carried until you learned to put it down.

He swept the vitamin bottle into the trash. Thunder shook the windows, and for the first time in months, he didn't wait out the storm in silence.