What We Carry

Elena stood at the kitchen counter, the old baseball glove from her marriage sitting beside her coffee like a dead animal. Three years since David left, and she still couldn't bring herself to throw it out. Outside, lightning cracked the sky—a sudden, violent illumination of everything she'd been avoiding.

Her cat, Juno, wound around her ankles, purring with the unearned confidence of creatures who've never held themselves responsible for another person's happiness. Elena had always hated that about cats. Their complete lack of obligation. Their selfishness framed as independence.

"You wouldn't understand," she told Juno, setting down her coffee. "You've never had to bear the weight of someone else's dreams."

She'd met David at a baseball game, of all places. He'd spilled mustard on her favorite dress and offered to buy her a hot dog as reparation. They'd spent seven years building a life together—careers, a mortgage, discussions about children that always ended in "someday." Then came the affair, the confession, the quiet apartment that suddenly felt too large for one person.

The glove had been his father's, passed down with the solemnity of religious artifact. David had never played. He kept it on his desk, a paperweight for bills he forgot to pay. Now it sat in Elena's apartment, gathering dust, whispering about inherited disappointments.

Another flash of lightning. This time, the thunder followed immediately, shaking the windows. Juno bolted under the couch.

Elena picked up the glove. The leather was stiff, cracked. She remembered David's hands, how they'd felt against her back in those early mornings before everything hardened. How they'd felt when he told her he'd met someone else—gentle, apologetic, already distant.

She'd been bearing this grief for so long it had become part of her posture. The way she hunched her shoulders when she laughed. The way she held her breath when someone asked if she was seeing anyone.

The glove didn't fit her hand. It wasn't meant to. That was the point of inheritance—you received things that would never truly belong to you.

Elena walked to the balcony door. The storm had broken, rain sheeting down like something was finally being released. She set the baseball glove on the small table outside, where the rain would soften it, change it, maybe ruin it. Maybe that was okay.

"Let it go," she said aloud. Juno emerged from under the couch, blinking, as if the cat understood that some things couldn't be domesticated. Some losses had to weather their own storms.