I found myself again after she left me

Chapter 2: The List

Chapter 2: The List

He played until his fingertips ached in that old familiar way, tender and raw, and then he set the guitar down against the wall instead of putting it back in its case. Leaving it out felt important, though he couldn't have said exactly why. Maybe it was just that he didn't want to shut anything else away today.

The apartment looked different in the gray morning light. Not changed, exactly — the same secondhand couch, the same framed print Maren had picked out in a*****e he'd hated and never told her he hated — but different in the way a room looks different once you stop performing normalcy in it. He noticed things. The print wasn't his taste. It had never been his taste. He'd just agreed, the way he'd agreed to so much, because agreeing was easier than the conversation that came after disagreeing.

He found a notebook in the kitchen drawer, one of the half-used ones from a job he'd left two years ago, and sat at the table with a pen he had to click twice before the ink caught. At the top of a blank page, he wrote a single line:

*Things I used to like.*

It felt like a strange thing to have to ask himself. He was thirty-four years old, and he was sitting in his own kitchen trying to remember what he liked, as though it were a fact that had gotten misplaced under a couch cushion somewhere.

He wrote slowly at first.

*Guitar. Old westerns — the black-and-white ones, not the Clint Eastwood ones, the really old ones with the corny dialogue.*

He paused, then kept going, faster now, like something had come loose.

*Hiking, but real hiking, the kind where you don't know exactly where the trail ends. Diner coffee, the bad kind, in the thick mugs. Calling Theo on Sunday nights.*

He stopped at that last one. He hadn't spoken to Theo in over a year — not because of any fight, but because Maren had never liked him, had called him "a bad influence" after one too many stories about their twenties, and Daniel had let the friendship wither rather than defend it. He stared at the name on the page for a long moment, then underlined it twice.

The list kept growing. Small things, mostly. Foolish, even. The specific way he liked his eggs, which he'd stopped making because she preferred hers a different way and it was simpler to just make one version. The radio station he used to leave on in the car, swapped out for her playlists somewhere along the way without either of them ever discussing it. A woodworking class he'd looked into three years ago and never signed up for because the timing "wasn't right," though looking back now, he wasn't sure whose timing that had been.

By the time he set the pen down, the page was full, front and back, in handwriting that had gotten messier as he went, as though his hand were trying to keep pace with something in him that had been quiet for a long time and suddenly wouldn't stop talking.

He read it over once, then again. It didn't feel like a list of hobbies. It felt like a map of everything he'd quietly buried, one reasonable compromise at a time, until the ground above it looked so flat and undisturbed that even he had forgotten anything was under there.

His phone was still on the nightstand in the bedroom. He walked back in, glanced at the pillow — still hadn't moved it, and today, for the first time, that felt less like grief and more like laziness he was ready to correct — and picked up the phone.

He scrolled to Theo's name. His thumb hovered over it for a long moment, the old hesitation rising up out of habit, the small internal voice that used to ask *is this worth the friction.* But there was no one left to cause friction with. That was the whole point.

He pressed call.

It rang twice before Theo picked up, his voice caught somewhere between confusion and delight. "Dan? Holy — it's been a minute. Everything okay?"

Daniel looked at the notebook on the kitchen table, at the guitar leaning against the wall, at the pillow he was finally, finally going to move.

"Yeah," he said, and found that for the first time in three weeks, he almost meant it. "Actually, I think I'm doing okay. You free Sunday?"