LOAD BEARING WALLS

The kitchen timer beeps. Sarah doesn't move from the couch.

System alert, I think, watching her from the doorway. Operator unresponsive.

"The lasagna's going to burn," I say.

"Then take it out yourself."

Thermal runaway imminent. But I don't move either. We're both excellent at this—the standing still, the waiting for the other to flinch first. Engineers call it a deadlock. Two processes, each waiting for the other to release a resource. In our case, the resource is pride.

I pull the lasagna out at 6:47 PM. The edges are carbonized. Acceptable material loss, I note grimly. Still structurally sound.

"You always do this," Sarah says, not looking up from her phone.

Vague error message. Insufficient debugging information.

"Do what?" I ask, though I know this is the wrong protocol. In mechanical systems, when you get the same failure pattern repeatedly, you don't ask what's wrong—you check the maintenance logs.

Our maintenance log would show: Three weeks since last date night. Five days since last real conversation. Forty-seven hours since she said "I love you" without me saying it first.

"You know what," she says, and there it is—the circular reference that crashes the whole program.

I sit down across from her. Attempting manual override.

"I'm sorry I forgot to pick up your prescription," I say.

She finally looks at me. "It's not about the prescription, Marcus."

Root cause analysis required. But I'm tired of analyzing. At work, I calculate stress tolerances, fatigue limits, points of failure. I model how much load a beam can bear before it buckles. I've never been able to model this—us, fracturing under invisible weight.

"Then what's it about?"

Sarah sets her phone down. In the dim kitchen light, I can see the exact angle of her jaw, the cantilever of her cheekbone. Even now, especially now, she's beautiful. Aesthetic considerations non-negotiable, I think. This component is irreplaceable.

"It's about you being here but not here," she says. "It's about me feeling like a variable in one of your equations. Something to be optimized."

Direct hit. Critical system damage.

"That's not—" I start, but she holds up her hand.

"Do you know what you did last night? During dinner? You spent twenty minutes explaining gear ratios to me. Gear ratios, Marcus. I teach kindergarten. I spent my day helping Emma Rodriguez learn to tie her shoes. I wanted to tell you about it. I wanted to tell you how her face lit up when she finally got it, but you were too busy explaining mechanical advantage."

Buffer overflow. Too much input. Processing capacity exceeded.

"I thought you liked when I explained things."

"I liked when you talked to me. There's a difference."

The timer beeps again—I'd set it for the garlic bread. Neither of us moves.

Secondary system failure. Cascade effect initiated.

"I do talk to you," I say, and even as the words leave my mouth, I'm running the diagnostics. Date night conversations: 73% me talking about work. Morning coffee discussions: redirected to project deadlines within 4.2 minutes average. Evening wind-downs: parallel processing, minimal data exchange.

Fuck.

"When?" she asks. "When do you talk to me about anything that matters? When do you ask me how I'm doing and actually wait for an answer?"

Catastrophic realization. Total system awareness failure.

I've been treating her like a fixed constant in my life equation, when she's always been the variable that makes everything else make sense. You can't optimize a marriage. You can't calculate love like bearing loads. You can't reduce a person to a set of parameters and expect them to stay.

"You're right," I say.

She blinks. Unexpected response detected.

"What?"

"You're right. I've been an idiot. I've been—" I search for the words, trying to step outside my engineer brain for once. "I've been so focused on maintaining everything, on keeping all the systems running, that I forgot we're not a machine. We're—"

"A mess?" she offers, but there's something softer in her voice now.

"I was going to say 'under construction.' But mess works too."

The corner of her mouth twitches. Preliminary positive response. Proceed with caution.

"Tell me about Emma," I say. "Tell me about her shoes."

Sarah studies me for a long moment, and I wonder if I've waited too long, if too many maintenance cycles have been skipped, if the damage is beyond repair tolerances.

Then she starts talking. And I listen—really listen, not planning my response, not thinking about the report due Monday, not calculating anything except maybe the exact shade of brown in her eyes when she smiles, which isn't something you can measure anyway.

The lasagna gets cold. The garlic bread stays in the oven too long.

Non-critical systems failure acceptable, I think. Primary function restored.

"I'm going to be better at this," I tell her later, as we're scraping burnt cheese off the pan together.

"Don't make promises," she says. "Just... try. That's all I need. You trying."

New operational parameters accepted. Margin for error: substantial. Required perfection: zero. Required effort: continuous.

I can work with that.

"Hey," I say, catching her hand as she reaches for the dishrag. "I love you. Not because you're optimized or perfect or because you make logical sense. I love you because when you laugh at your own jokes before you finish telling them, something in my chest recalibrates. Because you're the only chaos I've ever wanted to live inside."

She looks at me, really looks at me, and I see it—the structural integrity returning, the load redistributing, the system stabilizing.

"That was almost romantic," she says. "You know, for an engineer."

"I'm working on my translation protocol."

She kisses me then, and I think: This. This is the load-bearing wall. Not me, not her, but this—the trying, the failing, the trying again.

Some structures are designed to flex, to absorb stress without breaking. Marriage isn't a rigid beam. It's a suspension bridge, built to sway in the wind, to carry weight through tension and give.

I'm learning to sway.

We're learning to hold.