What We Carry

Maria stopped running three months after Ethan died, though she hadn't realized she'd been moving at all. That was the day her friend Kate found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, surrounded by empty vitamin bottles and unpaid bills.

"You're disappearing," Kate said, kneeling beside her. "And I can't watch it happen."

The vitamins had been Ethan's idea. He'd brought home bull-riding trophies and whole-food philosophies in equal measure, convinced that the right supplements could protect them from everything except luck. But luck was what killed him—a bad jump at the Calgary Stampede, eight seconds of miscalculated bravery.

Now Maria worked at a supplements warehouse, stacking bottles of the same brand she'd choked down every morning with him. The irony tasted like ash.

"There's a position opening in Denver," Kate said one evening, pushing a takeout container across Maria's scarred table. "Corporate. Benefits. A reason to wake up."

"I have reasons," Maria said, though she couldn't name one.

The warehouse manager called her into his office the next week. "The bull shipments are doubling next quarter. I need someone who knows the inventory."

She thought of Ethan's trophies gathering dust in the spare room. Thought of vitamins promised to fix what couldn't be fixed. Thought of Kate, who still came by every Sunday with groceries and gentle silence.

"I'll need help with the transition," Maria heard herself say. "I have a friend who's looking for work. She knows the industry."

Kate cried when Maria told her. Then she laughed, because that was how they handled impossible things—laughter leaking through the cracks of everything else.

"You're not running away," Kate said finally, the realization dawning like morning. "You're letting yourself run toward something."

Maria started running again the next week—not from grief this time, but through it. Three miles before dawn, when the world was quiet enough to hear herself think. She still took the vitamins every morning, but now they tasted like remembrance, not regret.

Some things couldn't be fixed. Some things could only be carried. This time, she wasn't carrying them alone.