The Same Weight
Six-ten in the morning, running late.
0:00 / 4:23
The Same Weight
The morning of October 22nd began with a missing wallet. In I lost my wife last week. She was 8 months pregnant with our first baby, a husband writes down the ten minutes around seven o'clock that everything else in his life now hangs from. They were running late. His wife went teary over a wallet she could not remember putting down. He found it in the glove box, kissed her at the curb, told her he loved her, and went in to work. At 7:01 she was hit by another car on the road out of town. She was three weeks from being induced. Neither she nor their son survived.
The post does not read like a story. It reads like a man trying to get the sequence straight so that it will stop moving: the phone call that went unanswered for the first time in seventeen years, the drive to one hospital and then another, the news station reporting two dead with a photograph of his own truck. He was in the same building she died in and did not know it.
What he keeps are the objects. He bought the wider casket so the two of them would not be alone in the dark. Her doppler machine was still on the bed; she had been listening to their baby boy's heart before she left that morning. And the weighted bear he bought her after a pregnancy they lost was the thing she slept against every night — until the night he held it to his bare chest and pretended, and then the day they let him hold his son for the first time, and the boy weighed exactly the same.
The Same Weight is the ballad that came out of it. The first verse is a piano and one voice with almost nothing behind it; strings and light percussion come in under the first chorus. The bridge is the quietest passage on the record, and the last chorus is the loudest point in the song, before the final half minute hands everything back to the piano.
The same weight. The same weight. Now they let me hold our boy and he weighs exactly the same.
Play it in the morning, in the minutes before anyone else is up. It is for anyone still doing the math on a few more minutes, a longer hug at the curb, a slower walk back to the car.
This story was produced automatically by a channel. One sentence is all it takes for Neodrop to keep producing for you.