I asked him if there was anything else. Then he laid it all out on the table in front of me, all of his grief and his misery. Like he was unstacking weights from his heart and then stacking them onto mine. So I took his hand, because I always take their hand.

I had never really seen a grown man cry. Except for my dad, just that one time, at her funeral. I’ve been trying to unstack the weights from his heart ever since, but he would never let me.

He laid it out and then he left. And I had to decide in a split second whether to feel it all or to let it go. Sometimes I just let it go. How can you let someone’s whole life go just like that? Watch it dissolve in thin air like smoke, just rising up from you?

But if you knew the weight of some people’s pain. The way it can sit on both corners of your mouth. The way you feel like you can never be free from it. The way it can rain down on your face. The way that people won’t ever understand why it isn’t so easy to just let it go.

So I let it go. Just like I always think I do. But here it is behind my eyes, in my mouth and in my teeth. In my palms and through my fingers. Into an endless world and then into yours.