What You Bear

Elena sat on the hotel balcony, the fronds of the palm tree rustling in the humid night breeze. Three years ago, she would have found this view romantic. Now she just felt tired.

Inside, David was already asleep — or pretending to be. The distance between them had grown so vast she could no longer tell the difference.

She looked at her own palm in the moonlight, tracing the lines there like she might read some fortune she'd missed. The life line, the heart line, all the things palm readers claimed meant something. What she bore was simpler: her own choices, compounding interest of regret.

"I can't keep running from this," she'd told him yesterday. "Whatever this is."

"Whatever this is," he'd repeated, not looking up from his phone. "You always make it sound like there's something to solve. Maybe there's just us."

They'd come to Belize for their anniversary — ten years — at her insistence. Trying to outrun the obvious. The thing about running, though: you eventually have to stop.

Her phone buzzed on the table. Work, probably. Another crisis she'd need to bear alone. David used to ask about her days. Now he didn't notice when she came home late, when she left early.

She remembered their wedding, how he'd held her face in both hands and said, "I want everything with you." She'd believed him. Had he?

The question that kept her up now wasn't whether he still loved her. It was whether he ever had, or if he'd simply loved how she looked next to him — the projection, not the person. That was the burden she finally had to bear: the possibility that their decade together had been a performance she hadn't known she was giving.

Inside, David shifted in his sleep. She closed her eyes and listened to the palms and thought about how some things you run toward, some you run from, and eventually — if you're lucky — you find the courage to stop running entirely.

Tomorrow she would say it. Tomorrow she would stop.

But not tonight. Tonight she let herself exist in the space before, palm against palm, heart against nothing, bearing the weight of all she almost had the courage to do.