What We Carry

The storm broke at 2 AM, as these things always do—like the universe waits for you to be most vulnerable before it tears itself open. Rain against the window, and somewhere beyond, the sky splitting with lightning that turned our bedroom strobe-lit and strange.

"You're doing it again," Mara said from her side of the bed. Not looking at me. Not touching me. The distance between us had become geographical.

"Doing what?"

"Bearing it." She turned then, eyes catching another flash of light outside. "Everything. You just... bear it. Like you're built from something harder than the rest of us."

She was right, in a way. Three years ago, when her mother died—the orange peel of her medication tubes curling on the nightstand, the smell of sickness in the curtains—I hadn't cried. Hadn't screamed. Had just made soup. Signed forms. Called the funeral home. Bearing it. Whatever that meant.

But the weight accumulates. It settles in your shoulders, your spine, the hollow behind your eyes. You bear it until you can't, and then what?

"I don't know what else to do," I said.

"Neither do I."

Another flash of lightning, closer this time. The room went white as a bone. In that second of illumination, I saw everything: the framed photos on the wall, the clothes draped over the chair, the life we'd built together like a house of cards in a hurricane.

"Your brother called," she said. "He's getting married again."

"Okay."

"Okay? That's it?" Her voice rose. "He's marrying someone new after what happened with Allison, and all you can say is okay?"

I stared at the ceiling. The lightning inside me had been building for years—a slow charge of unsaid things, of grief deferred, of love calcified into routine. What happens when lightning finally strikes? You burn. Or you illuminate. Maybe both.

"What do you want me to say, Mara? That I'm happy for him? That I don't think about how Allison—that I don't—"

"That you don't what?"

The thunder rattled the windowframe.

"That I don't wonder if some of us are just built to bear things. To outlast. To survive."

She reached across the dark then, her fingers finding my arm. "Or maybe," she said, "we just forgot how to put them down."

We lay there as the storm moved through, watching the sky break open and mend itself, over and over. Some things get struck by lightning. Some things just wait for the sun.