Some days I have coffee with your absence.
I sit at the table and look at your chair. I didn’t know that Absence could have furniture.
Sometimes I light a cigarette for nostalgia just to watch it burn between my fingers. I don’t even know what I’m waiting for.
Maybe for the smoke to take your shape. Maybe for it to hurt enough.
Sometimes, at night, I reach across the bed and kiss the neck of the empty space beside me.
Don’t laugh.
There was a neck there once. There were shoulders. There was warmth.
Now there is just a cold pillow and a fucking memory.
I run my hand down the back of your absence. Slowly. Carefully. As if I could wake you.
But ghosts don’t wake up.
Only the people who miss them do.
Sometimes I talk politics with your toothbrush.
He’s still here. Unlike you.
He’s always right, by the way. Fucking annoying. Just like you.
Sometimes I hate that toothbrush. Sometimes it makes me smile. Sometimes I want to throw it in the bin.
But I can’t.
I am afraid of throwing it away because I’m afraid of losing you again.
So it stays.
You stay.
Every bloody memory stays except you.
You know what?
Who told you that you left?
I still find you cooking in my kitchen.
Sometimes I smell something and run to the kitchen to see you there.
For half a second, I do.
Your back. Your hair. The sound of your laugh.
And then I blink.
Nothing.
Just the kitchen. Just me. Just another room that remembers you.
I hate those seconds.
Because for half a second you’re back.
And then I lose you again.
How many times can you lose the same person?
Your clothes are worse.
They still have your shape even when you’re not inside them.
Sometimes I touch them. Sometimes I talk to them. Sometimes I hold them against me.
There.
I said it.
Judge me.
I don’t care.
At least they don’t ask me to move on. At least they don’t tell me that time heals everything.
At least they understand what it means to be left behind.
They’re empty too.
I make breakfast for a memory sometimes.
Coffee. Toast.
Your place.
Mine.
Ours.
For a moment, my hands still remember the life we had.
Then I look at the table.
One person.
Two places.
And breakfast tastes like grief.
I’ll tell you something. Loneliness isn’t about having nobody around.
Loneliness is having someone everywhere who isn’t there.
But you know what? You didn’t disappear.
Your body did.
That’s all.
The rest of you stays here; with me.
In the bathroom. In the wardrobe. In the kitchen. In the empty half of the bed.
In the supermarket when I reach for your favourite food.
In a restaurant I won’t enter anymore.
In the smell of someone walking past you.
In fucking shampoo.
You leave a person once.
Their absence leaves you a thousand times.
So don’t tell me you’re gone.
You’re not.
I know where you are.
You are not where your body is.
You are where you are missed.
And here…
God.
Here you are everywhere.
You are so bloody missed that sometimes your absence feels more real than the people standing in front of me.
Maybe that’s the cruelest thing you’ve left me.
Not loneliness.
Your presence.
Because I can’t even miss you properly.
You’re still here.
Without being here.
You’re here with me.
Without me.
But with me.
And I keep touching things that touched you. Talking to things that once were with you. Sleeping beside the place where you used to sleep.
Trying to make a home out of everything you left behind.
Some people call this moving on.
I call it surviving around a hole.
You go to work. You laugh. You eat. You sleep. You tell everyone you’re okay.
And somewhere between brushing your teeth and making coffee, the person you lost fades again.
Nobody notices.
You don’t scream anymore.
That’s progress, apparently.
You just stop for a second. Swallow. And continue making coffee.
Maybe one day I’ll throw away the toothbrush.
Maybe your clothes will stop looking like you.
Maybe I’ll make only one coffee without noticing.
Maybe I’ll sleep in the middle of the bed.
Maybe the kitchen will finally become just a kitchen.
Maybe your absence will finally move out.
But not tonight.
Tonight there is still an empty chair in my kitchen.
There is still a cold side of the bed.
There is still a stupid toothbrush in the bathroom.
And there is still me.
Living with you.
Without you.
Talking to your absence because often silence hurts more.
You left.
But somehow I’m the one who became empty.
And maybe that’s what this is now.
Not death.
Not life either.
Just waking up every morning inside a memory.
A life without life.
