What We Keep

The corporate pyramid climbed another floor today, and somewhere in that glass hierarchy, I was supposed to care about quarterly projections. Instead, I watched my goldfish—your goldfish, technically—circle his bowl in that endless,figure-eight pattern you'd found so hypnotic.

"Bears hibernate," you'd said, drunk on your back patio, the water glass sweating circles on the table. "They sleep through the worst of it. Why can't we?" You were talking about your mother's decline, but I heard it as a prophecy.

Three months after the funeral, I'm still bearing it—the weight of unsaid words, the way you'd go silent for days, the marriage that had become a room we both stopped furnishing.

The dog, Buster, waits by the door most evenings. Not for you anymore—he learned that lesson quickly—but for the rhythm of return. He's adjusted better than I have.

Today, the goldfish floated at the top. I should have flushed him, but I let the water run in the sink instead, watching it swirl like your whiskey used to. In that moment, I understood something about grief: it's not about what we lose. It's about what we keep.

The pyramid will keep climbing without me. The dog will learn to love someone else. Even the goldfish was just borrowing time.

But you—I'm still bearing that weight. And some mornings, like today, I'm not sure if I'm hibernating or if I've already slept through the winter of my own life, waiting for a spring that never comes.