Balance Due

Got it, thank you. A period

where something larger should have stood.

I turned the phone face-down

on the kitchen table's scratched oak

and sat there.

Twelve years of writing checks

without discussion. The need

was structural—I saw the fracture

and became the beam. No one

asked. No one refused.

The arrangement had the quality

of gravity: unmentioned,

undeniable, impossible to renegotiate

once you'd agreed to bear the load.

The last one's cleared.

The overhead light hums

at a frequency I've never

had occasion to notice—

audible only now, in the absence

of the thing that kept me

too occupied to listen.

I sit with both hands flat

on the table's grain, twenty minutes,

and the kitchen sounds

like a kitchen for the first time:

the refrigerator's click,

the tap's slow domestic argument

with itself.

I should feel released.

Instead the room tilts

the way a structure tilts

when the bearing wall is pulled—

not falling yet,

just surprised by its own weight.

I run my nail along the table's

longest scratch and find

no end to it.