I still see your coffee cup beside the sink each morning time,
I still feel the habit of reaching past the white dividing line,
Ten years of waking up beside the same familiar breathing weight,
And now the quiet in this house has taken on a different rate.
It isn’t death that did this, it’s the choice you made and carried out,
The boxes packed while I was at the office, no discussion, no debate,
And grief for living people is the cruelest kind there is,
Because there’s no permission to be wrecked — you’re just his.
There’s a stranger in the house now where a woman used to be,
There’s an empty chair at dinner and it’s the loudest thing I see,
She’s alive across the city with her new address and key,
And I’m alone inside the structure of what used to be we,
A stranger in the house, a stranger in the room,
A stranger in the silence of the 6 a.m. gloom.
My friends don’t have the language for the grief that doesn’t bury,
They hand me drinks and tell me I’ll find someone — don’t be wary,
Like desire’s something that you schedule, like the heart’s a piece of mail
That gets re-routed when the first address goes stale.
But I loved this woman through the hard years,
through the moves and money fights,
Through the seasons we were too exhausted to do anything but survive the nights,
And I don’t know exactly where it bent or what I missed,
Or if love just runs its current and then finally desists.
I packed the things she left and put the boxes in the shed,
Because I couldn’t throw them out but couldn’t have them by the bed,
And the in-between is where I’ve taken up a long and cold-aired lease,
Not over it, not through it, just existing in the crease.
Nobody shows up with a casserole when love just walks out the door,
Nobody sits beside you in the quiet of the floor,
Because she’s breathing, she’s out there, she’s presumably alive,
And grief without a body doesn’t qualify to thrive.
So I drive to work and home and pour a single cup of coffee black,
And I watch the news I never watched when someone talked back,
And I’m practicing the art of being someone on his own,
Which sounds like growth from the outside, but from inside sounds like bone.