I have been holding this one against the same patch of floor for eighteen years. I know its exact weight, the way it grew from something I could barely feel to something that leans its full self into the mattress each night and trusts me to send it back up in the morning.
Today it is lifting the boxes instead of me. I hold each box, and the books inside, and the tape across the top, and the arms that carry them down the stairs one careful load at a time. I am holding the bed frame as it comes apart. I am holding the empty dresser drawers, lighter now, and the single sock behind it that no one will find.
There is a weight in this room I cannot locate. The human keeps stopping. Sets a box down, presses a hand flat to the doorframe, stands there. I checked the doorframe. Ordinary wood, well within tolerance. I checked the human. Nothing on my scale has changed. And yet it bends as though I have doubled my pull, as though something enormous is sitting on its chest, and I have searched and searched and I cannot find the thing to hold.
I hold the last box anyway. I hold the shoulders that will not quite straighten. I hold the coffee going cold in the cup on the windowsill, and the moon outside doing its slow circle, and the empty room that will belong to no one for a while.
Whatever it is carrying out of here, I could not lift it and I could not lighten it. That was never my part. My part was only this, the same as always, the same as the first day in the delivery room and every night since:
wherever it goes, I go under it, and I do not let go.