What We Bear Alone

The vitamins sat on the counter like a promise I couldn't keep myself. Orange bottles, white bottles, the regimented evidence of her decline. Sarah had been meticulous about them, even when the doctors said there wasn't much point. Vitamin D for bones that were already hollowing. B-complex for nerves that had stopped firing properly. I threw them all away yesterday — the first act of vandalism in my own life.

Now it was midnight and I was standing in the kitchen wearing her favorite hat, a crushed velvet thing that smelled faintly of lavender and whatever perfume she'd worn to look alive. I looked ridiculous. I looked like a man who'd forgotten how to be himself.

The spinach wilted in the pan as I watched, darkening like something dying. Sarah used to make this dish — garlic, olive oil, a splash of lemon. She'd insisted on the health benefits, said it would keep us young forever. The irony was almost poetic.

I remembered our trip to Montana, the year before the diagnosis. We'd seen a bear at the edge of our campsite, a massive grizzly that regarded us with ancient indifference. Sarah had grabbed my hand, her grip tight, terrified and electric. "It could kill us," she'd whispered, and I'd laughed, said that was why life felt real sometimes — because it could end.

Now she was gone and I was still here, still bearing the weight of a world that had become impossibly quiet. The bear had survived. I had survived. The spinach had turned to mush in the pan.

I ate it standing over the sink, wearing her hat, the vitamins' empty ghosts watching from the trash. I'd forgotten how to cook for one person. I'd forgotten how to be one person. Tomorrow I'd return the hat to its hook in the closet. Tomorrow I'd learn to live in a world without her promises. But tonight, I'd bear this small absurdity, this tiny rebellion against the unbearable lightness of being alone.