I didn’t hear her voice the morning she left. Usually, she’d mumble something—half-awake, half-meaning it. Something like “Hey, your hair’s a mess,” or “The cat knocked over your coffee again.” It was always something small, something ordinary, like the way sunlight finds its way through the kitchen blinds even on the days you wish it wouldn’t.
But that day, there was just silence. The kind that makes you pause in the middle of doing something stupid—like tying your shoes—and wonder what’s missing. It wasn’t the kind of silence you forget. It stuck to the air like humidity after a storm, thick and unsettling.
Her coffee cup sat on the counter, half-full. Except she never left coffee unfinished. It was a thing with her. She’d down it in one go, like a ritual, then press her lips into that same tight smile, every time. But today? Cold. Abandoned. The milk had separated into that gross film at the top, like it had been sitting there for hours.
I couldn’t shake this tightness in my chest, this creeping sense that something had gone wrong somewhere, like I missed a signpost on a road I’d driven a thousand times. I tried to remember if we’d fought last night, but all I could come up with were flashes of us sitting together, too tired to talk, both scrolling our phones like the world wasn’t right in front of us. Like we hadn’t been drifting for months.
And then I saw it—this little slip of paper, tucked beneath the salt shaker. She always did that. Notes tucked in weird places. I used to think it was cute. Now, it felt like a punch to the gut.
It was just three lines. Three lousy lines. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to say what I need to say. I’ll be gone for a while.” She hadn’t signed it. She didn’t need to. Her handwriting was the kind I could recognize in the dark—small and neat, with these tiny loops that always made me smile, once.
I read it twice. Three times. By the fourth, the words didn’t make sense anymore. Gone where? For how long? “A while”—what the hell does that even mean? A day? A week? Forever? I picked up my phone, opened our chat, then closed it. What was I going to say? “Come back?” She wasn’t coming back, at least not now. And for reasons I couldn’t piece together, it felt like she might never.
I don’t even know how long I stood there in the kitchen. Long enough for the cat to wind itself around my legs, meowing for breakfast like nothing had changed. I fed him, then sat on the floor next to his bowl, staring at the spot where she’d left her keys last night.
Why didn’t I say anything?
All those nights when she turned away just a little too quickly, her shoulders tense, her voice softer than I remembered. The evenings when I stayed late at work—not because I had to, but because I didn’t want to come home and face the silence that had settled between us like dust. I could’ve asked. I could’ve tried. Instead, I let her drift farther and farther away, telling myself we’d figure it out eventually. But “eventually” never comes, does it? Not when you need it to.
I got up, walked to the window, and stared out at nothing in particular. The street below looked the same as it did every day. Cars inching by, people with somewhere to be, birds picking at crumbs left by some kid who probably wasn’t supposed to have snacks in the car. The world hadn’t changed. But everything else had.
And then, like an idiot, I laughed. I laughed because I realized I didn’t even know where she might go. Not really. I could name her favorite café, the park she liked when the weather was nice, her sister’s place upstate. But the truth? The real, hard truth? I didn’t know her like I used to. Not anymore.
Somewhere between the wedding and the mortgage and the endless routine of two lives running on parallel tracks, I’d lost her. Or maybe she lost me. I don’t know. But I do know this: when I finally went back to bed that night, the sheets still smelled like her—just faintly. And that made it worse, somehow
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