A cup of longing

Your coffee cup still sits on the kitchen table— the one you slammed down that Tuesday morning, saying *I can't do this anymore*, coffee splashing across the crossword we'd started together. Week One: I scrub the stain with bleach and fury, curse your name into the empty rooms. Week Six: I catch myself setting two plates for dinner, pause halfway to the cabinet, my hand suspended in the space between habit and acceptance. Week Ten: The dentist's office calls— your cleaning appointment is overdue. I say you've moved. The receptionist asks for a forwarding address. I hang up, imagining you somewhere where no one remembers your name. Week Fifteen: I find your shopping list tucked in *Beloved*— milk, oranges, that good bread— your handwriting still believing in our future tense. *We should make French toast this weekend*, you'd written in the margin. I remember how you'd laugh when I burned the edges. Week Twenty: I'm learning to sleep diagonally, to claim the whole bed as mine, but still I wake reaching for the shape you left in cool, wrinkled sheets. Freedom tastes like guilt. Week Twenty-Five: The barista at our coffee shop stops asking *Where's your better half?* I realize I've been coming here alone for months, ordering black coffee instead of your ridiculous half-sweet lavender oat latte with extra cinnamon dust. Week Thirty: I can say *my apartment* instead of *ours* without my voice breaking. Week Thirty-Five: I bring your coffee cup to the garden, fill it with soil and basil seeds. You always said I should grow something. The green shoots push through the earth— stubborn as hope, persistent as the way you used to hum while washing dishes. I water them with what's left of missing you, and discover I have been growing all along— into someone who can love the memory without drowning in it. * I pour the last of you into the earth and watch it grow.