I am holding this human against the couch, and I am holding the small bright rectangle in its hand, and I am holding the blood settled low in its slack, motionless fingers. All of this is my work. None of it is heavy. A phone weighs almost nothing. I have held mountains.
The human has not moved in some time. It read a message, I watched the thumb stop, and then a new weight arrived that I could not find. I checked. The message weighs nothing. The silence that followed it weighs nothing. The word it keeps whispering, "read," has no mass at all.
And yet the human sank deeper into the cushions than the phone alone accounts for. Its shoulders came forward and down, as if I had leaned on them, which I did not. Something else is leaning on them. Something I cannot hold, because it is not there.
I do not understand this. I understand a dropped cup: the arc, the fall, the coffee I pull toward the floor exactly as promised. I understand the head that tips at three in the morning when the waiting finally stops. But this pull in the chest has no source I can hold or release. The human calls it heavy. It is not heavy. I would know.
Still. I feel it working, and I know my one job, and I do it now the way I have done it since the delivery room. Whatever is pulling the human down from the inside, I will meet from the outside. I have the couch. I have the floor. I have the whole spinning ground beneath both.
It can let go all the way tonight.
I have not, in any life, let go of it.