What We Carry

The apartment felt smaller without her laughter. Three weeks after Sarah moved out, Marcus was still adjusting to the echo of his own footsteps.

The cat — Barnaby, a rescue tabby they'd adopted two years ago during that snowed-in February — kept sitting by the door, waiting. Marcus understood the feeling.

He crawled under the desk to reconnect the cable modem. The Comcast guy had been and gone, leaving behind a tangle of wires and a cheerful "You're all set, buddy!" that made Marcus want to scream. He was forty-three years old; nobody should be calling him buddy anymore, especially not when his life was falling apart.

The cable was frayed where it connected to the wall. He'd have to replace it. Everything needed replacing now — the comfortable routines, the shared silences, the future they'd planned together like architects drawing blueprints for a house that would never be built.

His phone buzzed. His mother. "You doing okay, honey? You bearing up alright?"

"I'm fine, Mom." The lie tasted like ash. "Just busy with work."

"Your father was the same way," she said, her voice soft with memory. "Never wanted to talk about it. Just kept bearing everything inside himself until — well. You know."

He knew. His father, dead at fifty-five from a heart attack that everyone said was stress-related. The man had been built like a bear, strong and silent, right up until he wasn't.

Marcus extricated himself from under the desk, dust bunnies clinging to his sweater. Barnaby meowed, then trotted over and rubbed against his leg.

"At least one of us is honest about being lonely," Marcus said, scratching the cat behind the ears.

The modem lights flickered to life. Connection restored. But some connections, he was learning, couldn't be reestablished with a simple reset. Some cables, once severed, stayed severed.

He made coffee — black, the way she'd never liked it — and stood by the window watching the city wake up. Somewhere out there, Sarah was probably making her own coffee, maybe with someone else, maybe alone. The thought didn't hurt less for being predictable.

What he bore now was the weight of mornings that stretched before him like uncharted territory. What he bore was the knowledge that love, like electricity, could course through your life for years and then simply — stop.

Barnaby jumped onto the windowsill, tail flicking with territorial indifference.

"Yeah," Marcus said. "We're going to be alright."

The cat didn't respond, but then, cats never had to bear the burden of optimism.