There are two toothbrushes in the ceramic cup by the sink. One blue, one green. You keep them both there even though only one ever gets wet anymore. It’s not out of sentiment, not really. More out of habit. Like how you still sleep on the left side of the bed even though there’s no longer anybody else spilling over the right to warm up your body. Or how you always set two plates at breakfast before sighing and returning one to the cupboard.

You live your life around absence now. Give it space. Let it breathe. Funny how you’ve found a way to make absence present in that big house.

Mornings are the hardest. There’s this hush before the world stirs — the birds are too tired to sing and the sun is still rubbing its eyes. That’s when your hand reaches instinctively to a part of the bed that hasn’t belonged to anyone in a long time. You touch cold sheets and wonder if memory has weight, if it was just the thought of them that presses into cotton and lingers like body heat.

The kettle whistles too loudly at you these days.

You take your tea by the window. Salt and wind curl in from the sea, sharp, familiar — almost too familiar. She used to joke about it — how everything tasted like the ocean: toast, tea, her skin. She’d laugh when you kissed her collarbone and pretended to gag from the salt.

There are still some pictures on the mantle. They’re crooked, but you make sure they’re dusted weekly. There’s one where she’s laughing, head thrown back, eyes closed. You’re not sure what made you, but you took that without her knowing. You loved it, she hated it — said she looked like a cartoon — but you still kept it, she still let you. You said it was the most honest she’d ever looked. You were right.

You always liked the truth in people’s laughter. They could fake smiles, fake love, fake the meaning behind their words and everything else but laughter, there was nothing more real than it to you — nothing more true. And hers was gospel.

And every so often, you remember something else that is true. That till this day, they never gave you a body. You felt that was the cruellest part. The not-knowing. The waiting. The steady, surgical removal of hope, day by day that someday, they would. The men in suits came with apologies and folded flags, getting the former out of the way after you confirmed your identity. Barely gave you a chance to breathe sense into the interaction.
“It was a storm,” they said.
“Didn’t see it coming.”
“No time to signal.”
“We don’t think she suffered.”

You nodded and robotically made them tea, like you did for her, like you did for the others that came after.

Some days, you make yourself walk the cliffs. You stand near the edge and look down — not with despair, no, but in a quiet consideration. You wonder if the sea still remembers her the way you do, that she was the reason you moved here, that it took forever to comb the tangles out of her hair, that she woke up to a cup of warm water before tea every day. You wonder if maybe, it holds her. Not in malice, not in violence, but the right way. The way a secret is kept. Safe. Sacred. You wonder if you could persuade it to give her back, even if only for a day.

You once read that grief is just love with nowhere to go.

But you’ve found places. In the garden she planted and never got to see bloom. In the letter you write every month and seal in an envelope you never mail. In the little boy next door who yelled out her name the first time you let him play with the old chessboard.

You found that love always finds cracks to leak through. And that loss just teaches you how to catch it.

This morning, as you rinse out your cup, you leave the green toothbrush untouched.

The sea roars outside, same as before, same as always. The wind moves through the house like a breath that isn’t yours.

And when the salt it carries from the sea lands on your lips, you swear — just for a second — you taste her again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Juanma Muñoz on Unsplash