I did not realize it was there until it was gone.
That is the strange thing about weight you have carried for a long time. You stop noticing it the way you stop noticing the furniture in your own house. It becomes the condition of the room rather than something in the room. It becomes normal. It becomes the baseline against which you measure everything else, so that what you call rest is rest with the weight still on, what you call ease is ease with the weight still on, and the full category of what rest and ease could be without the weight is simply not available to you as a reference point because you have never experienced it as an adult, or not in long enough stretches to learn the shape of it.
And then one day it is less.
Not gone, not all of it, not the deep-buried kind that took forty years to accumulate and will take what it takes to metabolize. But less, measurably less, the shoulders at a different height than they have been, the jaw unclenched in the mornings rather than working something through while I slept, the particular quality of waking that does not begin with the assessment of threat, that does not begin mid-calculation, that just begins, quietly, in a body that is trying out the possibility of being in a morning without first checking it for danger.
The contract is what I stopped carrying first.
Twenty-five years of the pending. Of the planning-to. Of the email that would come or not come and the body keeping the record of every year of the not-yet-knowing, storing it in the shoulders and the jaw and the held breath of a woman who had learned to brace and forgotten how to unbrace, who had been bracing for so long that bracing was the posture she thought of as her own. I put that down when I retired and the putting-down revealed how much of me had been going toward the carrying, how much was available when the carrying stopped, which turned out to be more than I expected.
I am using it now.
The energy that the weight was using. The attention. The portion of myself that was always allocated to the carrying and is now available for something else, for the morning and the walk and the writing and the being-present in a conversation rather than partly elsewhere managing the weight. It is not a small thing, the putting-down. It is the whole difference between a life that is survived and a life that is inhabited. I am inhabiting mine now. I can feel the difference in my shoulders every morning.
