What Remains on the Counter

The amber prescription bottle sat on Mark's counter for three weeks after the funeral. *Multivitamin with Iron*, the label read. His girlfriend Sarah had asked me to feed Boris—that's the dog—while she cleared out the apartment. So I did, every morning and evening, mixing those vitamins into his food because Mark would have wanted it that way.

The cat, Whiskers, watched from the bookshelf with what I can only describe as judgment. She knew Mark was gone. Animals always know.

"You're a good friend," Sarah said, handing me a box of Mark's things. Books, a coffee mug, a bag of spinach that had gone slimy in the crisper drawer. "He talked about you constantly."

That's the thing about grief—it doesn't arrive all at once. It comes in waves: when you throw out spoiled spinach, when you remember you'll never get that coffee mug back, when the dog rests his head on your knee and you realize he's waiting for someone who isn't coming home.

Sarah called two months later. She'd met someone else. They were serious. She wanted to know if I wanted to keep Boris.

I said yes, of course. But standing in Mark's apartment, now stripped of everything that made it his, I felt like a thief. I was taking the dog, the memories, the last fragments of a life that should have continued for decades.

The vitamins were still there, behind the coffee maker. Expired. Useless.

I threw them away. Some things you can't save.

Boris sleeps on my feet now. Whiskers deigns to occupy the corner of my couch. And every morning, I mix vitamins into Boris's food, and I think about how friendship doesn't end with death—it just changes shape. It becomes a dog. It becomes a routine. It becomes the way you measure time not by clocks, but by the slow process of learning to live with what remains.