Member-only story
The Weight You Never Carried
By Kenneth Thomas
My grandfather once told me about a man named James, who lived three houses down in the Arkansas heat. Quiet man. Always in a denim shirt, collar sun-faded, eyes set back like a memory he didn’t want to share. The town said he was “off.” Not dangerous, just... distant. He’d sit on his porch, watching the kudzu crawl and the sun do its tired laps across the sky. Kids whispered he’d lost someone. Maybe in the war. Maybe to himself.
One summer night, lightning struck a sycamore near James’s yard. Fire raged. People came running. It was James—stooped, shaking—who broke through the back door of a neighbor’s house and carried out their dog, gashed and howling, before the roof caved in.
That’s when they found out: James was a decorated combat medic. Vietnam. Had held boys' bodies together with his hands. Had watched friends vanish under mortar blasts. Had come back not broken, but burnt. And when he returned, the only therapy offered was silence. So he lived in silence.
I tell you that because every day we pass a thousand Jameses. People who carry a private flood behind their ribs. Women who raised children through violence. Men who walked through addiction and made it home sober. Survivors who don’t wear badges. Some days they barely hold on. Some days they’re the reason someone else makes it.
