The Routine of Missing You

The morning light hit my nightstand at 6:47 AM, as precise and unforgiving as always. My iphone screen glowed with three notifications—none of them from you. I swallowed my vitamin D supplement with a glass of lukewarm tap water, the pill scraping my throat on the way down. You always said I was obsessed with supplements, that I treated life like something to be optimized rather than lived.

I went for a run, my sneakers hitting the pavement in the same rhythm I'd maintained for three years. Running was supposed to be meditation, but lately it felt like punishment. Each stride carried me further from the person I used to be—confident, reckless, willing to believe in forever. Now I just calculated heart rate zones and mile splits, metrics of a body that still functioned even as my heart had seemingly forgotten how.

The ethernet cable behind my desk was frayed at the connector, exposing copper wire like a wound I refused to tend. You'd promised to replace it last summer, back when we still made promises to each other. The internet still worked, intermittently, much like we had. I sat in the chair you'd picked out at IKEA, the one with the questionable assembly instructions that made us laugh until our ribs ached, and stared at the wall where your art used to hang.

My phone buzzed—a work email about the merger, requiring immediate attention. I opened the attachment, my thumb hovering over the response key, and caught my reflection in the darkened screen. My eyes looked older than they had six months ago. The lines around my mouth had deepened. I looked like someone who had learned that love is not enough, that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is let go.

The vitamin bottle sat empty on my counter. The cable still dangled threateningly from the wall. My running shoes collected dust by the door. And somewhere, you were waking up without me too. Maybe that was the point. We keep going through the motions until the motions become real again. We take our vitamins. We replace the cables. We keep running. Eventually, we remember how to live.