What We Carry

The spinach was stuck between his teeth — that perfect, fluorescent green — when David told me he was leaving. I remember noticing it and thinking: this is it? This is the moment? Not the dramatic dinner I'd imagined, not the wine-soaked confrontation I'd rehearsed in mirrors and shower steam, but here, in flannel pajamas, with frozen spinach burning on the stove.

Three months later, I'm still untangling knots. Buster — his dog, technically, though he never walked him, never cleaned up the shit in the yard — sleeps at the foot of the bed I now share with nobody. The dog dreams with twitching paws, chasing something in sleep I can't see.

I spent last week climbing under the house, eyes stinging from dust and mouse droppings, cutting the cable. David had installed some elaborate system himself, coaxial snakes writhing through the crawl space like copper intestines. I sliced through each one with garden shears, the sharp *snip* echoing in the hollow beneath the floorboards. It felt like surgery without anesthesia.

My hair is coming out in clumps now. Stress, the internet says. Or grief, though I refuse to call it that. I stand before the mirror, examining the thin patches like someone inspecting a crime scene. When did this happen? When did the woman in the mirror become someone I barely recognize?

Buster lifts his head, ears perked. A car door slams down the street. For a second — just a second — my heart stutters. But it's just the neighbor, just Tuesday, just the world continuing to rotate on its axis while mine sits stalled, suspended in the space between *before* and *after*.

I turn off the stove. The spinach is mush now, an unrecognizable collapse of what it once was. I scrape it into the trash. Buster watches, tail thumping once against the floorboards, a small metronome marking time I can't seem to keep.

Tomorrow, I tell myself. Tomorrow I'll call the dentist about the tooth that's been aching for weeks. Tomorrow I'll make something real for dinner. Tomorrow I'll be someone who knows exactly what to do with all this space he left behind.

Tonight, there's just the dog, and the quiet, and the spinach-blackened pot soaking in the sink.