The Weight I Was Carrying

It's been three years since my divorce and the move up here, and I want to say upfront that I came north wanting distance and got considerably more of it than I'd bargained for. The isolation works on you slow, like cold water, you don't notice the chill until you're already shaking. Was standing on my porch one January afternoon, that low gold light we get up here that never quite turns into real daylight, when something lifted off me that I hadn't fully realized I was carrying. A weight I'd gotten so used to that I'd stopped noticing it as weight at all. Nothing dramatic happened in that strange in-between light. No voice, no vision, nothing I could point to and call proof. More like the difference between holding your breath without realizing it and finally letting it go. The isolation itself didn't disappear and the dark months stayed exactly as long as they always do up here. But something in me that had been clenched for three years straight came loose that afternoon, and it's stayed loose since. Still don't have a name for whatever visited that porch. I just know I went back inside warmer than I'd been in three years, and the thermometer had nothing to do with it.