Waking up feels strange,
like you’re coming to in an asteroid belt
or an avalanche. You pour fog
into your morning cereal and every clink of the spoon
against your teeth
seems to have something to say -
a letter, a number, an apology,
something unintelligible.
The bathroom tile on your bare feet is unseasonably cold,
and looking at yourself in the mirror
is like reading Tolstoy in Russian
for the first time. She’s left your drawers
and counters bare.
You hadn’t noticed how colorful her things were
until they weren’t there. She’s taken
her bottles of lotion, the pastel ones and the neon ones
and the one with green and white stripes,
and now everything in the room is white.

The pills go down like pebbles.
The light outside seems either brighter or dimmer
than it should be; you can’t tell which.
Your eyes have been trained to focus on her,
every little curve of her lips and wrinkle in her clothes,
every twitch of her finger as she stirs her coffee,
and now that she’s not there there’s nothing to focus on.

There’s a draft now. You’ve never felt it before.

It’s amazing, how many things
she hasn’t touched. She hasn’t touched
the books on the third shelf,
or the stuffed duck you keep in your bedside cabinet,
or the bottle of nighttime pain relievers you forgot you had
near the fridge.
But looking at those hurts worse
than looking at the things she forgot,
because they’re things that she could have touched,
could be touching right now.
But she isn’t.
You don’t know where she is.

You touch everything for her,
with your left hand,
the hand she squeezed before she got out of the car
and you drove away before you could look back.

You bite off all the nails you’ve been trying to grow out.
You chew at them while you wait
for the shower to warm,
and they’re gone by the time you’re ready to shampoo.
When you step out, you’re bitten by everything
that isn’t there anymore. You wonder
how long you can be occupied by these novelties,
how long you can be intrigued by them
before they start becoming too much.
You think about moving out,
taking only the things you were both indifferent towards,
finding a smaller house
further away from everything.
You think about doing what she did -
packing up all your things into a bag
and getting on the first plane you can,
but something ties you to where you are.

So you stay.
You pull away from everything
and pretend she has left you with nothing.