What We Carry

Sheila stood in the vitamin aisle, reading labels she couldn't focus on, while her phone buzzed with divorce lawyer updates. At forty-seven, her body was becoming a stranger, her marriage a relic she kept carrying like a heavy coat indoors.

The running app on her wrist reminded her she hadn't logged her morning miles. Three years ago, she'd started running after Richard revealed his affair—a punishment disguised as self-care. Now it was just another thing she couldn't quit.

She remembered the bear they'd seen in Yellowstone, years ago, the way Richard had grabbed her hand, excited like a child, before either of them knew about the hotel room in Phoenix. The bear had looked at them with exhausted indifference and turned away. She should have turned away too.

The text from her mother: 'Your father put the house up for sale.' The pool where she'd learned to swim, where she'd sat with Richard during that first perfect July, would belong to strangers. Everything was being sold.

Her youngest nephew's baseball tournament was Saturday. She'd promised to go. All those parents on bleachers, pretending their children's strikeouts mattered, that the long summer afternoons wouldn't end, that the kids wouldn't grow up and cheat and leave.

She dropped the vitamin bottles into her basket—iron, calcium, something for joints that wouldn't stop aching, supplements for a life she couldn't quite want to live anymore. The woman in the mirror at home, applying concealer to dark circles, seemed almost familiar. Not quite herself, but close.

Tomorrow she would run six miles. Saturday she would cheer at the baseball game. She would sign whatever papers Richard's lawyer sent. She would take her vitamins. She would bear it all, the way she'd learned, by not stopping, by letting the motion itself become the answer, even if she'd forgotten the question.

The bear had known something. The indifference wasn't giving up—it was just survival.