Your birthday comes around like a bird that hits the window— once, hard, then circles somewhere I can’t see. I still know the constellation of things you left behind: the dent in the passenger seat, a jacket smelling faintly of rain, three coins sleeping in the ashtray like they were waiting for another day. I thought grief would be a flood. It isn’t. It’s a house with one room that keeps filling with seawater while the rest stays perfectly dry. I can make dinner. I can laugh at the right parts. I can stand beneath fluorescent lights and choose between two kinds of bread like the universe hasn’t misplaced you. You were supposed to grow old. That was the deal nobody wrote down. Your hair was supposed to turn silver, your hands were supposed to gather all those little maps of living. Instead, your name became a scar the calendar keeps reopening. And I hate the ordinary things— how the moon keeps changing clothes, how buses still sigh at the curb, how strangers complain about the weather with both hands wrapped around their lives. Sometimes I catch myself saving a story for you. A joke. A photograph. A stupid little detail about the neighbour’s dog. Then it happens— that awful moment when my mind reaches the edge of the world and finds nothing there. You were supposed to grow old. I was supposed to get tired of your stories, roll my eyes when you told the same one twice, know exactly what you’d order, exactly when you’d call, exactly how you’d say my name. Instead, I know the exact distance between memory and reality. It’s only a heartbeat. But it’s a heartbeat I can never cross. I’ve tried moving on like dragging a photograph through a burning house— saving what I can, watching the edges disappear. And maybe that’s what love becomes when there’s nowhere left to put it: A key with no lock. A song with no singer. A lighthouse still turning over an empty ocean. I don’t want to forget you. But I don’t know how to remember you without becoming the person who is always looking backward. So I’ll walk. Not away from you. Just forward, with your absence beside me like a second shadow that only appears at sunset. And if I someday smile without thinking of the cost, I hope that isn’t betrayal. I hope somewhere beyond whatever comes after this, you’re laughing at me for taking so long to learn: Some people don’t leave your life. They become the strange weather inside it.
