The Weight

For three days, I wanted nothing more than to get out of bed, but I couldn’t. It was a long weekend off from college because of MLK Day. I hadn’t brushed my teeth, eaten, showered, and had only had a sip of water from my bedstand. A dull, hollow lethargy immobilized me, trapping me in my body. It had been weeks since I had written anything, and I called myself a writer. I didn’t sleep much, either. Mostly, I just stared at the ceiling, my brain coursing through every mistake I’ve made, bathing in misery, picking me apart, coming up with examples of how I make the world worse with my very existence. My phone lay on the sheets beside me, with texts I didn’t have the energy or enthusiasm to answer. I was worried that if I called someone to let them know how I felt, I’d just be overdramatizing it, and I’d be fine soon. Yet nothing had changed. 

I knew people who had thought about or even attempted suicide. One of them told me that when they were in that state, it was as if nothing else mattered. I racked my mind for this feeling, but it wasn’t there. I couldn’t do that to my family. No, I even felt guilty calling myself depressed. There were people out there suffering far more than I. I just needed to pull through, but damn, lately, it was so difficult. 

Today was different from the past three days, though. It was Tuesday. I had class. I couldn’t spend another day suffocating in my bedroom. I had to try. 

Tentatively, I sat up, pulling back the sheets. A chain shackled to my ankle ran down to a steel ball resting on the floor, about the size of a medium bowling ball. It had appeared last week. No one else could see the thing, yet I had to lug it everywhere, unable to break it. I wasn’t Sisyphus, but this was my invisible boulder. Of course, this had happened before, so I was used to it. Usually, it took some weeks, maybe months, but it eventually did disappear, as did the feeling, but it had never been so heavy.

I was about to lie back down when my phone buzzed. There was a text from Isaac.

You coming bro?

Fuck. I had forgotten that he and I had that class together. I sat, waiting for the screen to return to black, rereading the text over and over again when I reached out impulsively, snatching the phone, and opening my messages. 

Yeah. Gimme a bit

I sighed. Whelp, I did it. Now, I had to actually get up. 

Thirty minutes later, clean and still in a sleepy, dream-like stupor, I descended the stairs to the apartment living room. Isaac sat in his wheelchair by the door, eyebrows raised at me. 

“Where the hell have you been lately, Jordan?” he asked.

“I went home for the weekend.”

“Bullshit.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Don’t worry, I won’t ask any more questions.”

I snorted, grinning at him. It felt odd to smile. “Where is Jude?”

“I don’t know, probably with his boyfriend and forgot all about me.”

“Do you need me to push you?”

Isaac smiled warmly at me. “If you’d be so kind.”

Isaac was my childhood best friend and now roommate. He had been paralyzed after a car accident as a kid. His old wheelchair broke, and he was using a transit wheelchair for hospital patients in the meantime, but it required someone to wheel him around. His cousin Jude had volunteered to do so, although he wasn’t the most reliable.

The summer heat was in full flare in the parking lot. Sweat ran down my neck as we went to the bus stop. I had put the weight in my backpack so I didn’t have to drag it, and the chains rattled as I still struggled to walk. Relief washed over me as Isaac and I stepped into the air-conditioned bus. 

“It’s been hot as hell lately,” someone behind us said, talking on the phone. “Yeah, I heard there was a drought. Maybe that’d explain why my sink stopped working yesterday.”

While the awful weather had disturbed me and others, Isaac seemed totally at ease, wiping away occasional sweat, smiling out the window, and drumming his fingers on his wheelchair. I was already exhausted, wishing I could crawl back into bed, dreading the further walking I would have to do, and praying the bus would hurry up so I could get it over with.

“Are you okay?” Isaac asked, looking at me concernedly. “Your face is red.”

I leaned my head on the seat in front of me. “I’m fine.”

As soon as the words tumbled from my mouth, a horrible metallic grinding sound arose from the front of the bus. The driver shouted something over his walkie-talkie, veering to the right. I screwed my eyes shut, praying for the worst as some of the passengers screamed. Yet there was no catastrophic impact, and the bus rolled to a stop in a field not far from the road. Smoke billowed out of the engine as the driver helped us all outside. I caught my breath, my heart hammering. Something nudged my pant leg. I looked down and saw Isaac, calm as ever.

“Call an Uber,” he said.

I reached into my pocket. It was empty. I checked the other one. Empty as well. “Fuck!”

“It’s okay,” Isaac said. “Let’s walk.”

Panicking, I looked back at the ball and chain. It had fallen out of my bag, which had torn, and lay in the soil between grass blades. I could already feel its familiar weight. God, I just wanted to be rid of it. Now, I had to carry it with me all the way home. I didn’t know if I could manage or if I’d simply collapse to dust.

Cars rushed by, the wind whistling, the sun burning its impression on the back of my neck as I pushed Isaac, my pace gradually growing slower and slower, and the breaks I took to gather my energy grew longer and longer.

“Do you need some water?” 

“No, Isaac. You keep it for yourself. There isn’t much to go around lately.”

“Suit yourself.”

The shackle around my ankle had heated up from the sun and had become a torturing device, a hot iron stuck to my skin. The pain shot up my leg, pulsating throughout my body like a searing EMP blast. My tongue was dry, the texture of sandpaper, and my lungs cried for help, desperately trying to suck in more air as I pressed forward. My vision blurred, and I swayed from side to side. Isaac turned around, his face suddenly stricken with alarm as I stumbled backward.

“Jordan!” he called.

It was as if everything happened in slow motion. I turned around to see the ball and chain get caught in a gnarled tree branch sticking out of the ground, yanking me back. I tumbled down a hill, landing in a ditch. The last thing I saw was the steel ball flying down, the chain curling in the air as it came down right on my face, enveloping me in black. 

I awoke, unable to move my legs, lying in the shade of an oak tree, kaleidoscopic shards of colorful light dancing before my eyes, my face painfully swollen. I blinked them away and saw Isaac’s face before me, so close I could feel his breath tickle my nose. 

“Why can’t you ever ask for help?” he scoffed.

“What?” I asked groggily, realizing my mouth wasn’t dry anymore, and I wasn’t so thirsty.

“Sometimes,” Isaac said, holding up the chain and shackle, now opened, “you can’t do everything yourself.”

I fully snapped back to consciousness, jolting forward. I looked down at my ankle, still charred from the shackle but free. I was free.

“How did you do that?” I asked incredulously. 

Isaac smiled and stood up, moving out of the way, allowing me to see the empty wheelchair behind him. I looked at it and then back at him, unsure if the steel ball had damaged my mind. 

“You’re…” was all I could utter.

“What?” Isaac asked, confused.

“Uh, nothing.”

“Come on.”

Isaac lifted me and set me down in the wheelchair. I sat in a daze as he wheeled me up the hill and through a collection of trees, where we arrived in the apartment complex parking lot. The sun no longer burned as it did, replaced instead by thick, cottony white clouds that diffused the light like a heavenly shawl protecting us. Cool and drowsy, I struggled to rise in the kitchen and walk up the stairs, Isaac holding me up.

“You’ve got this,” he said, helping me lie down in bed.

“Thank you,” I whispered, eyes closed.

“Of course.”

A deep, heavy sleep overtook me. When I got up, I checked my phone. It was Tuesday morning again, no time had passed. Only, there were no texts on my phone from Isaac.

I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My face was perfectly fine, undamaged by the steel ball. My ankle, however, was still burned by the shackle, faintly pink, nearly imperceivable. The weight was gone. I looked up and saw the empty wheelchair in the corner of the room, under a photo of Isaac on the wall. 

“Thank you,” I repeated, a bitter smile passing over my face as I realized that today marked a year since he had died.