Numbness

Sugar settles to the bottom faster than I can remember
that two mugs on the table aren’t loyalty, just bad muscle memory.
My elbow seeks support where your sweater used to be,
and falls into the void with a soft crack,
as if it isn’t the air that breaks but some inner partition.

You are not a proofreader. A proofreader has a plan and a red pen.
You are simply the spacebar sticking in my morning thoughts.
When I watch a film, I don’t hear your remark about the editing –
I just feel my own pupils narrowing,
as if it were you focusing right now on a bad shot.
This is no longer a dialogue. This is domestic schizophrenia,
when I rub the bridge of my nose exactly the way you used to before an argument,
and I grow frightened of my own fingers.

The world didn’t become “denser from your edits.”
It just became riddled with holes, like an old sweater,
through which your particular draft keeps blowing.
I buy things you would have hated, just to check
whether it triggers any resistance in my chest.
But there is no resistance. There is only the quiet dissolving of my speech into yours.
I start using your parasitic fillers,
as if swallowing someone else’s dead cells to fill my own hollows.

You haven’t switched to monologue mode.
You’ve become my shortness of breath at the third minute of a brisk walk.
You are that one-second delay when I can’t remember a street name,
because in my head, your heavy gaze is now lying on that name.
We don’t laugh together in an empty room.
It’s just the echo of my own voice striking the walls
and coming back slightly distorted, with your characteristic accent.

Physics works ruthlessly:
a body that has vanished leaves behind a curvature of space.
And so I now walk slightly askew,
because from one side I am constantly pulled down by your absence,
heavy as a wet tarpaulin.
I don’t wear your experience like a flag.
I’m simply getting used to living with this phantom pressure on my left shoulder,
where you once had a habit of falling asleep,
leaving behind a numbness that will never pass.