The Sunday Morning After

She left her **hat** on the hook by the door—a beige fedora I'd bought her in Barcelona, back when we still laughed at the same jokes. That was three months ago. Now the hat collected dust, a tiny ghost haunting our entryway.

I swallowed my **vitamin** D supplement with lukewarm coffee. The doctor said I was deficient, said it explained the fatigue, the fog. He didn't ask about the crying jags in the office bathroom or how I'd started sleeping in the guest room because our bedroom smelled like her shampoo, like betrayal.

"You coming to **padel**?" Marcus asked through the phone. His voice was too bright for 9 AM on a Sunday. "Jamie and Sarah are bringing beers after."

I looked at the window where the coaxial **cable** ran like a dark vein along the baseboard, connecting us to a world that kept moving forward. Sarah, who'd been at our wedding. Sarah, who probably knew before I did.

"Can't," I said. "Busy."

"You've been busy every weekend since—"

"Since my wife decided she needed space to find herself?"

Silence. Then: "Marcus said you should come out. It's good to move around."

I hung up.

The truth was, I'd become a **zombie** of my former life. Same commute, same grocery store, same goddamn takeout place on Tuesdays. I went through the motions, ate when hungry, slept when tired, felt nothing much at all. The worst part wasn't that she'd left. It was that I couldn't remember the last time I'd cared about anything before she left either.

Her hat caught a draft from the open window, rocked slightly on its hook.

I picked it up, put it on. It smelled like her—sandalwood and the particular citrus of her perfume. For the first time in months, something broke through the numbness. It wasn't hope. Just the sharp, undeniable fact that I missed her, missed us, missed whoever I was when I was someone who bought hats in Barcelona on impulse.

I called Marcus back.

"Pick me up in twenty."