What We Carried
The evening before Marcus left, we stood on the balcony watching lightning stitch itself across the sky like broken silver thread. He'd cut his hair that morning—the first time in ten years—and the bathroom sink still held the clippings, dark commas of what he'd shed.
'You're going swimming in the Amazon?' I asked, not for the first time.
'Not swimming. Working.' His thumb found the scar on my palm, the one from the papaya incident three summers ago. We'd been drunk on cheap wine and he'd tried to teach me to juggle fruit. The knife had slipped, but the scar was the least of what we'd carried forward from that night.
Behind us, the cable box blinked through another channel we weren't watching. Some reality show where people voted each other off islands. The metaphor wasn't lost on either of us.
He was leaving because I'd asked him to. Or because he'd offered. The sequence of events blurred after a point—like deciding whose turn it was to walk the dog, only the dog was our marriage and walking it meant ending it. We were swimming in the same direction but no longer toward the same shore.
'They have papayas there,' he said.
'I know.'
The lightning illuminated his face, the new angles of his jaw exposed without the hair that used to shadow it. He looked like someone I'd met once, not someone I'd woken up beside for 3,247 mornings.
I thought about asking him to stay. I thought about asking him to leave without saying goodbye. I thought about a lot of things that didn't make it past the threshold of my throat.
'The cable's paid through December,' I said instead.
He nodded. The storm was moving closer now. Somewhere between us lay everything we hadn't said—whole oceans of it, dark and deep and impossible to swim across anymore. When he stepped forward to hug me, his arms familiar against my back, I realized this was the thing I'd been swimming toward my whole life: the moment you let go because holding on has become harder than the drowning.
The rain started just as the door clicked shut behind him.