Cable to Yesterday

The white charging cable sits coiled on the nightstand, a silent witness to my unraveling life. Three weeks after Maya's departure, it remains—still plugged into the wall, still waiting to recharge something that's gone.

I'm running now, sneakers hitting pavement at 5:47 AM, breath visible in the cold morning air. Each footfall is an attempt to outrun the silence in our apartment. My iPhone buzzes in my pocket—another notification I shouldn't check but do anyway.

"Did you see her Instagram?" Sarah's text reads. "She looks happy."

The cable's still there when I return, coiled like a sleeping snake. A relic of our shared existence. Each morning, I run farther, faster, trying to exhaust myself enough to sleep through the night without reaching for her side of the bed. My battery drains while hers stays at 83 percent—unchanged, unreachable.

Some mornings, I almost call her. Most days, I just keep running.

Tonight, though, I stop. I unplug the cable from the wall, roll it carefully, and place it in the box with her books. The charging port on my iPhone is loose anyway—always has been. Maybe it's time I stopped fixing things that were never quite right to begin with.

Tomorrow, I'll run without the phone. Without the cable. Without the ghost of what we almost became.