A man woke up lighter.
Not metaphorically. He stepped on the scale and he weighed four hundred grams less than he had the night before. He had not exercised, had not visited the bathroom, had not done anything that would account for the loss. Four hundred grams — roughly the weight of a Cavafy paperback — which is to say, everything anyone has said about love and loss in Greek.
He touched his hip where the weight had been. Nothing felt different. That was the problem — nothing felt different, but something was gone. He attributed it to the scale and forgot about it.
The next morning: three hundred grams lighter. Then five hundred. Then, on the fourth day, a full kilogram. He visited a doctor. The doctor found nothing. "You're healthy," the doctor said. "Whatever you're losing, it isn't medical."
By the end of the month he had lost nine kilograms. His clothes hung. His face sharpened — cheekbones emerging like rocks at low tide. His wedding ring slipped off in the shower on day nineteen. He caught it before it reached the drain. It sat in his palm, a circle that had fit for eleven years and now rattled on his finger like a promise made to a larger man. People said he looked good, which is what people say when someone is disappearing in a way they cannot name.
He began to inventory what he had lost. Not fat — the doctor had confirmed this. Something else. He went through his apartment: everything present. He went through his contacts: everyone accounted for. He went through his memories and found, on the fourteenth of the month, a gap.
A Tuesday in September. He had been somewhere. He had been with someone. The details were gone. Not blurred — removed. A clean extraction, surgical, the weight of that day lifted from his body and his mind simultaneously.
He lost another memory on the twentieth. Another on the twenty-fifth. Each one corresponded to a drop on the scale. Each one was a day he had spent with someone whose name he could no longer retrieve, in a place he could no longer locate, doing something that had mattered enough to weigh four hundred grams.
He was losing love. Not the emotion — the physical weight of it. The accumulated mass of every moment he had spent in the company of someone who had seen him, known him, held him. The body keeps these. The body is an archive. And the archive was being emptied.
By spring he weighed what he had weighed at sixteen — before the first kiss, before the first departure, before the first time someone had said his name in a voice that meant: you are not alone.
He stood on the scale and understood: this was what alone weighed. The body that had carried nine kilograms of other people was now carrying only itself.
He stepped off. He stepped on. The number had not changed. There was nothing left that weighed anything.
The scale, which had no opinion, held steady.