What We Carry Forward

The running started three months after the funeral. At first, it was just movement—legs pumping, breath ragged, the pavement blurring beneath my sneakers. Anything to exhaust the body so the mind would finally shut up.

Max would wait by the door. David's golden retriever, now mine by default. He'd watch me lace up with those knowing amber eyes, as if judging me for running away instead of staying to feel things. The dog had more emotional intelligence than I did.

"I'll be back," I'd tell him, though I wasn't sure I meant it.

The route took me past the community garden where David had kept a plot. I'd speed up every time, refusing to look at the overgrown mess of weeds and withered vegetables. Until the morning I stopped.

The spinach was still growing.

Somehow, in the chaos of hospital visits and memorials and a life collapsed into boxes, the spinach had survived. It shouldn't have—it was fall, the wrong season, the soil neglected. But there it was: tender green leaves pushing through cracked earth, stubborn and alive in the middle of all that dying.

I knelt in the dirt, my running shoes sinking into mud. Max nudged my hand, his warm weight grounding me.

David used to say spinach was the most underrated vegetable. "It doesn't demand attention like tomatoes," he'd said, watering our garden. "It just grows, quiet and determined, and then it nourishes you."

Tears finally came—hot and fast and three months overdue. I hadn't been running toward healing. I'd been running from the work of it.

That evening, I cooked the spinach. Max sat at my feet, waiting for scraps. The kitchen was too quiet, but the bitterness of those greens tasted like medicine. Like starting over.

Like letting myself miss him without disappearing into it.

I stopped running the next morning. Max and I walked to the garden instead. There was work to do.