I’m here to return my shadow. I was assured it was a perfect fit when I got it, but the longer I live with it, the more I’m finding it too heavy and dark. Lately, for instance, I can feel it pulling on me when I drag myself out of bed in the morning. I’ve also noticed that it cools my morning coffee too quickly. My wife has started telling me that she’s getting lost in my shadow. My children, too. Just the other day, I stumbled over it and fell. When my six-year-old daughter found me trying to untangle myself from it at the bottom of the stairs, she asked, “Daddy, why are you swimming in your shadow?” And on my last visit with my mother at the nursing home, she asked me why I brought my father’s shadow with me. My father was the kind of man everyone believed to be easygoing and carefree, a man who happily took life as it came. But my mother always complained to me during my father’s many business trips that he enjoyed slow-dancing with depression more than with her. It always fell to me to reassure her that I would choose to dance with her first every time. And when she found my father dead in a pool of gin on the bathroom floor the year I turned sixteen, she made me heft him into bed so she could tell everyone that he passed peacefully in his sleep. At first, I assumed her comment about me having my father’s shadow was just one more sign of her dementia. But I’ve begun to notice how those co-workers at the office who knew my father have started giving me a wide berth, as if to avoid falling into my shadow. And yesterday when my father’s old business partner and my boss told me, “You’re casting a very deep shadow these days,” before he declined my promotion, it became clear to me that whoever fit me with this shadow all those years ago must have confused my measurements with my father’s. So, as you can see, I need to return this shadow for something a bit lighter, both in weight and brightness. I know I should’ve been more careful over the years, but I lost the receipt somewhere along the way. If it helps at all, I am more than willing to accept store credit.