Carried: Cancer

It runs as total, uncomplaining responsibility, a self-sacrificing service that takes on everyone's problems and keeps no care for the self, a pillar of strength who gives everything and quietly believes they deserve the depletion. Beneath the kindness sit repressed grief, rage and a long-suffering hopelessness that has curdled, in the deepest place, toward not wanting to be here at all. The clinical name is a shape, not a diagnosis; and where the shape reaches a wish not to live, its work belongs with another person, someone trained to sit with it, not with a reading.

I carry what went wrong for everyone, ask for nothing back, and somewhere I stopped wanting to be here for it.

The sin-eater, who took into themselves the wrongs of everyone else so the dead could rest, consuming what was never theirs until nothing of their own remained. The form implies a task: to set down what was never theirs to eat, and be met by someone while they do.