What We Bear

The palm reader had been wrong about almost everything, which somehow made her prediction about my forty-third year feel more inevitable. She'd traced the life line with her nicotine-stained finger, shaking her head at how short it appeared, then promised me a vitamin-deficient existence if I didn't learn to bear the weight of my own choices.

Now, three months later, I found myself running through the predawn streets of a city that felt increasingly like a stranger's borrowed coat. My knees clicked—a complaint, not a injury. Somewhere around mile four, I'd stopped running toward anything and was simply fleeing the silence of my apartment.

"You're exhausting," Sarah had said, and she hadn't meant it as a compliment about my cardio routine. She'd meant it as a diagnosis. She'd stood in our kitchen, surrounded by my regimented vitamin supplements—D for mood, B for energy, magnesium for something I'd read about on a reputable-looking blog—and told me that living with me was like dating a spreadsheet that occasionally remembered to buy flowers.

I could bear a lot. I could bear her leaving. I could bear the Oracle of Palm's prophecy about my emotional atrophy. What I couldn't bear was how right they both were.

The streetlights flickered off as dawn grayed the sky. I slowed to a walk, my breath pluming in the cooling air. A convenience store appeared like a mirage. Inside, I bought a breakfast burrito and sat on the curb, watching the sun rise over the palm trees lining the avenue—those absurd, prehistoric plants that somehow thrived in concrete cracks.

I ate. I breathed. I let myself feel tired. The vitamins could wait. The running could wait. For once, I would simply bear witness to my own life instead of trying to optimize it.