That which is spent, but cannot be repaid

Josh was baffled that something so small could weigh so much.

He loved to work with his hands, and his special talent was that he could almost always guess the weight of something just by picking it up. Sometimes he could guess how heavy something was just by looking at it and knowing what it was made of.

It was an intuition Josh had always been blessed with. He could never tell you exactly why. Josh had never been the smartest nor the most articulate.

The best math he had ever learned was how to multiply one number by another for woodworking. All that talk about density, mass, and universal constants was for smarter people to be interested in.

He had never gone to college, barely made it out of high school, and was lucky enough to land a stable job with a nice wife who had a better brain than his. Josh’s son– who would be seven years old in a week– had inherited his mother’s brain and his father’s intuition.

He was going to be an engineer one day.

Josh took on extra work at his job, made a couple extra chairs, tables, and stools to sell, and put that money away for his son’s education. When all was said and done, he had saved up more money for his son than he ever had for himself.

Money was also one of those things Josh couldn’t wrap his head around. Someone tells you what something’s worth, assigns a number to it, and sells it for that exact number of dollars and cents. Then, the government and everyone else around you tells you what number your own life is worth too. Rent, hospital bills, car payments, food, water, and most of all: The money he had saved up in his bank account.

That number was what he was worth, and it had never been very much. If he measured his worth like that, then his son was worth a lot more than he ever had been. Exactly two thousand thirty three dollars and sixty seven cents more. Two thousand five hundred sat in a savings account for the day his son would need it to go to college.

It all boiled down to a number. But numbers were strange. If someone else had the same numbers as him, it had always been Josh’s numbers which were more important. It was always Josh's numbers which were more valuable to him.

That only changed once he met his wife, and once again as his son was brought into the world. Suddenly, it wasn’t Josh’s numbers which mattered anymore. It was his son’s numbers. His age, his cost of living, the grades on his tests– always proudly above a ninety-five for anything math and science related– even his height and weight which grew every day. He’d be an engineer one day.

Someone who could go a lot further than Josh ever could.

The more Josh spent time with his son, the more he learned one thing: All of it was numbers. The school had been telling him and his wife that his son was smart enough to skip a grade or two. Josh could hardly wrap his head around something like that. His wife had never skipped a grade, and Josh had been held back for two years.

The math just didn’t add up. If his son was the sum of Josh and his wife, then his son should be getting held back one year, not jumping forward two. Josh always joked that his wife had cheated on him with someone a lot smarter than him.

In Josh’s mind, whatever you put into something was something that had to come out in equal value at some point. If you got too much out of spending too little that might as well have been stealing. If you got too little out of spending too much, then you’d been robbed. It was a debt waiting to be collected at some point. Whether that debt would be collected in money, time, or both, no one really knew.

That was the other thing Josh had trouble wrapping his head around: Time.

One year could feel like a short fleeting moment, or it could be one of the most eventful series of events in his lifetime. It could slow down or speed up depending on how much he liked what he was doing. Time also got longer and shorter when it was nothing but a memory too. If the time spent was important, he remembered it as if it was longer. If it was pointless, then it barely registered when he looked back on it. The fourteen years he had spent in school were about the same as the six years he had spent with his son when he looked back on it. Heck, it might have been less.

The last four months were even stranger. They felt like an eternity. Every day a week, every week a month, and every month a year. And now that he reflected on those four months, it all blended together into almost nothing. The future was markedly weirder than the past too. Everyone always thinks they know what’s gonna happen in the future until it’s the present. Then when the present is past you feel stupid for ever having tried to guess.

Since his son was born, Josh had been looking towards nothing but the future. Always trying to predict what would happen next. Always trying to take measurement of something that he couldn’t. Always sacrificing the present for his son's future.

His son was six, he should be seven in one week. His son was forty six and a half pounds, Josh had felt it the last time he picked him up. He was four feet tall on the dot, about ten and a half from shoulder to shoulder. Josh never took a measure of how much his son had cost him when he was alive, but the funeral service told him exactly what he was worth when he died. The coffin was two thousand five hundred dollars.

Fate had a way of kicking people in the jaw.

His son was worth more than that. Josh knew it in his bones. His son was worth more than the price of a coffin or the money he’d set aside for his future. It felt wrong to buy one, so he didn’t. He made it himself. He refused to let his son be measured by a number of dollars.

Time and love were two things people always tried to put a number on, but never could. Time was what Josh had exchanged for money. Now it was nothing but time that Josh wished he could get back. Love was something he had not spent enough of for his son. And so, he spent both for the coffin because that was the debt he owed to his son and nothing less.

Now that he lowered that coffin from his shoulder, he thought only about how it was the heaviest thing he had ever carried. Something so heavy that its weight lingered long after it was off his shoulders and buried in the ground.

Thinking of all the things he should have done. All of the things he should have seen coming. All the things which didn’t go to plan, and now never would.