10/15/2026
"What Is Mine to Carry"
By: Brent Keough
I haven’t been reflecting as much lately.
The days keep passing through my hands,
and I’ve been letting them.
There are things I used to turn over for hours
that I now leave where they happened.
I’m still trying to understand
whether that is peace,
or whether I’ve grown tired of lifting them.
I used to unpack my life into the glasses.
Give a memory a landscape.
Give an ache a place beside the water.
Behind those lenses, I could approach myself slowly,
see something difficult at a distance
and stay with it long enough
to hear what it had been trying to say.
But there is a danger in looking back for too long.
You begin arranging your life around the evidence.
Every hurt finds its place.
Every departure explains another locked door.
Eventually, even an ordinary kindness
has to pass through the history
of everyone who failed you
before you let it come inside.
I have stood guard over things
that were already gone.
Kept arguments alive in empty rooms.
Prepared answers for people
who were never going to ask the question.
There is a strange loyalty in that,
giving the past another day of your life
because it took so much of the first one.
And time keeps moving.
It does not wait for a fair explanation.
It does not return the years
once I understand why they hurt.
There is something difficult to accept in that,
something almost merciful:
this day is still available to me,
even with yesterday unresolved.
So here I am, at the crossroads,
trying to distinguish what happened to me
from what is now mine to do.
I can spend the afternoon
rehearsing another person’s intentions.
I can also answer the person beside me
with patience.
Both will use the same afternoon.
That is where the weight has shifted.
Into the small choices
I used to overlook while searching for meaning.
How I speak when I’m tired.
What I do after disappointment.
Whether I make someone else carry
the sharp edge of a feeling
they had no part in creating.
I still feel it all.
Grief can catch me in the middle of a good day.
Anger can arrive with a convincing argument.
Fear knows exactly which memories to bring.
I am learning to let them finish speaking
before I decide where my feet will go.
Some evenings, that pause
is the hardest work I do.
The glasses have held so much of my life,
but they cannot make the road obey me.
They cannot promise that love will stay,
that effort will be recognized,
that the next door will open.
I have to choose how I knock
with the answer still on the other side.
There is a humility in that
I could never sell my way around.
A limit to persuasion.
A point where wanting something badly
changes nothing beyond the wanting.
I stand there now with my hands open,
feeling how much energy I spent
trying to hold what had no handle.
And what remains in my hands
deserves more care than I have given it.
My attention.
The words I can still take back before I say them.
The work I can do honestly today.
The chance to sit beside someone I love
without making them compete
with everything happening inside my head.
I think the next reflection begins there.
With the life close enough to touch.
With accepting that it will end,
and allowing that knowledge
to make me more careful with an ordinary evening.
I have spent enough evenings
waiting to become someone
who would know how to live them.
There are still boxes I need to open.
I will open them when I can.
I will hold what I find
without requiring it to become beautiful,
without demanding a lesson
from every broken thing.
Some things need to be mourned.
Then the kettle needs filling.
Then the day asks something else of me.
I haven’t been reflecting as much lately.
Perhaps the work is moving
from the glasses into my conduct,
where I have fewer chances to revise it.
I am standing at the crossroads
with no promise about either road,
and this much responsibility:
the next step is mine.
