What We Left Behind

The running shoes still sat by the door, laces untied, gathering dust in the corner where you'd kicked them off that last morning. Three months, and I hadn't moved them. Some part of me believed that if I kept everything exactly as you'd left it, you might walk back through the door and pick up where we'd ended.

I ate spinach for dinner again—wilted, sad, microwaved with too much salt. You used to make these elaborate salads, the kind that took forty minutes to assemble. "It's about self-care," you'd say, chopping cucumbers with surgical precision. "We need to take care of ourselves if we're going to take care of each other." I'd watch your hands, the way your ring caught the light, and think: this is what happiness looks like. Not the salad. The ritual. The being seen.

The vitamin bottle on the counter expired last week. I kept buying them, this ridiculous regime you'd started us on after your father got sick. Something about prevention, about insurance against a future we couldn't control. We were thirty-two, thinking about mortality while standing in our underwear, dry-swallowing pills that smelled like synthetic health.

Your hat is still on the hook by the door. That ridiculous beige thing with the wide brim you'd worn to Sarah's wedding. I remember you dancing in it, drunk on champagne and joy, your laugh cutting through the terrible DJ music. I remember thinking: I want to make you laugh like that forever. Some promises break themselves.

The neighbors got a dog last week. I hear it barking through the walls at 3 AM, and I lie awake remembering how we'd talked about it. "Next year," you'd said. "When we're more settled." We kept waiting for the right time, the settled time, the time when life would finally stop being something that happened to us and start being something we were living.

I don't know which is harder: remembering everything, or realizing how much I've already started to forget. The particular way your coffee cup left rings on the table. The sound of you breathing beside me in the dark. The feeling that this life—the one I'm still living—was something we built together, and now I have to figure out how to live in it alone.

The running shoes are still there. Tomorrow I think I might finally move them. Or maybe I'll put them on and see how far I can go before I stop looking back.