Inventory of Absence

The apartment was too quiet now. Mara was gone, and all that remained was the echo of her absence and the detritus of three years together. David sat on the edge of the bed they'd shared, staring at the **pool** of morning sunlight on the hardwood floor. It was the same spot where their cat, Barnaby, used to curl up like a comma of orange fur, before Mara took him in the separation.

He'd always hated her **vitamin** regimen — the colorful pharmacy of supplements lined up on the bathroom counter like soldiers in formation. Vitamin D for mood, B-complex for energy, magnesium for sleep. Now they were his, and he swallowed them dutifully each morning, wondering if they'd work for him the way she claimed they'd worked for her. He'd never told her that he secretly flushed half of them.

The **baseball** cap on the closet hook was another ghost. It had been her grandfather's, worn thin at the brim, smelling of wool and attic dust. She'd worn it during bad depressive episodes, pulled low over her eyes like armor. David had never understood why she kept it, or why she reached for it when the darkness came. Now it hung there, accusing him.

She'd taken the television, but somehow the **cable** box remained, its LED eye blinking in the entertainment center like a dying heartbeat. He'd canceled the service yesterday, another severing of the shared life they'd built together. The customer service representative had asked if he wanted to pause instead of cancel, as if there might be a pause in grief too, as if he could just resume his subscription to happiness whenever he was ready.

David stood up and walked to the window. The pool across the courtyard glimmered blue and artificial. He remembered Mara floating there last summer, her hair spread like dark seaweed, laughing at something he couldn't hear from this distance. That version of her felt like a different person entirely, and the version of him who'd watched her from this window was gone too.

He picked up the baseball cap and put it on. It smelled like her shampoo now. The vitamins sat in his stomach like stones. Somewhere, Barnaby was probably curled on Mara's pillow, purring against the silence she couldn't escape either.

David unplugged the cable box and dropped it into the trash box he'd been packing all morning. Some things, he realized, weren't meant to be paused.