Missing

I rolled over and, like in the movies, patted her side of the bed. It took a few seconds to remember she’d left the night before.

The day immediately darkened.

I haven’t left the house for two days. She stocked the refrigerator before she left (with a few well-placed notes to remind me of my chores), and I haven’t felt the need to go anywhere.

Or do anything.

It’s hard to get up enough enthusiasm to walk to the corner bakery for a donut. It’s almost like there’s no point to the effort: buying one donut and one coffee isn’t the same as one donut, one danish, a coffee, and a tea.

The ritual’s broken.

She’s only gone for a few weeks, writing a story in Taiwan for her magazine. Not so far in a modern world, but far enough to put me in bed when she’s awake; to wake me when she sleeps; to cut our hitherto overlapping hours to mere minutes, half a world away.

I worked on my book for a few hours before I figured out that I couldn’t think. I put everything away and sat on the sofa and listened to the radio and read all my neglected issues of The New Yorker that have been piling up. If she calls, I can claim I’m doing research—but I doubt she will. It’s about 2:30 a.m. over there.

There’s a fog over me. I can’t understand what I’m looking at.

I’ve expected this absence for awhile, but there’s no real way to prepare for the sudden (or not so) missing of someone that’s been so there—who’s now not.