allons, allons

the weight of morning

Sarah pressed her face against the window, watching the city wake up three stories below. The coffee shop across the street had its lights on—warm yellow squares that cut through the gray dawn. She'd been standing there for twenty minutes, maybe longer, unable to move away from the glass.

The apartment felt different without Marcus. Not empty, exactly, but rearranged somehow, like furniture moved an inch to the left. His coffee mug still sat in the sink, a brown ring staining the white porcelain. She couldn't bring herself to wash it.

Three weeks, she thought. Three weeks since he'd packed his camera bag and kissed her forehead like he was blessing something he'd never see again.

"It's just work," he'd said. But his eyes had already left, traveling to places she couldn't follow.

fragments from a letter never sent

Dear M—

I found your book of Neruda poems wedged behind the radiator this morning. The spine is cracked at the page where you underlined "love is so short, forgetting is so long." Your handwriting in the margins looks like birds fleeing.

The woman at the bodega asked about you yesterday. She remembered how you always bought oranges, how you'd test each one for weight. "Where is orange man?" she said in her careful English. I didn't know how to explain that you've become a ghost who still pays rent.

The photographs you left behind are scattered across the kitchen table like tarot cards predicting a future I can't read. In one, I'm laughing at something off-camera—probably a joke you made. I look happy in a way that feels archaeological now.

inventory

What remains: your jacket on the bedroom chair, still holding the shape of your shoulders. Two tickets to a movie we never saw. The plant you bought that I keep forgetting to water. A shopping list in your handwriting that says "bread, milk, time."

What's gone: the sound of your key in the door at 6:47 PM. The way you hummed while shaving. The particular quiet that came after your laugh. The future we'd sketched in the margins of Sunday mornings.

What I'm learning: how to make coffee for one. How silence has its own weight. How missing someone can feel like carrying water in cupped hands—precious and impossible to hold.