Monday morning had a different quality.
Not lighter exactly. The grief was still present would be present, would continue to surface at angles I hadn't anticipated. That was the nature of it. I had learned enough in therapy to stop expecting loss to behave like a completed task.
But different.
The specific difference of something that had been carried alone for years and was now, for the first time, carried in a room with another person.
I had said her name out loud.
He had asked what she would have been like.
He had stayed on the floor while I cried twice in one afternoon and had not made the crying into something to manage or resolve or move through efficiently. He had just been there, steady and unhurried, in the specific way he was always steady and unhurried.
I made coffee and
