What We Carry Forward

The tarot reader traced the line on Elena's palm, her finger lingering where the life and head lines intersected.

"You're carrying something," the old woman said. "A grief that won't resolve itself."

Marcus watched from across the small table, fighting the urge to reach for his wife's hand. They hadn't touched properly in months—not since the second miscarriage, not since the doctor's office had become a regular pilgrimage. Not since they'd stopped trying.

Outside, their cat waited on the fire escape, moonlight turning his fur to silver. Marcus had found him as a stray kitten, back when possibility still felt like something you could hold in your hands. Now the cat was twelve, arthritic, and Marcus wondered which of them would outlast the other.

"What do you see?" Elena asked the reader.

"Bear and baseball," the woman murmured, and Marcus stiffened. "A father who loved you through games he never understood. A burden you took on young."

His father had died three years ago, leaving Marcus the house he couldn't afford and a lifetime of unexpressed disappointment. That last visit—his father coughing through innings, insisting Marcus wasn't too old for catch—still surfaced in dreams. He'd never told Elena how his father's final words were about spinach, of all things. A metaphor for force-feeding yourself what's good for you even when it tastes like despair. Some lessons, like some griefs, get handed down like inheritance.

They walked home in silence, the city muggy around them. In their kitchen, Elena methodically chopped vegetables for a salad they wouldn't eat.

"She was wrong about one thing," Elena said, not looking up. "The grief does resolve. It just resolves into something you carry."

Marcus watched her knife catch the light. Some weights, he realized, you don't set down. You just learn to bear them differently—until carrying them becomes its own strange kind of strength, until the weight itself becomes part of your shape in the world.