To you, This morning, too, I brewed coffee. Adding two spoons of sugar and stirring, the thing you used to say slipped out of me before I knew it. "It's hot, take it slow." Anyone hearing it would let it pass, but the way it sounded in my own mouth was so unfamiliar that I stared at the cup a long time. Seeing that the words you used have become my words now, time is a strange thing. You seem to speak more often now than when we lived together. When I open the window the cold air comes in, and you would have called this wind bracing. This is a morning when that word comes back to me.
Toward the end of a winter day, there was a view that blurred when I breathed on the bus window. Back then I thought being erased was simply the way of things.
When the window fogged, you would write something on it with your finger and quickly wipe it away. Each time, I couldn't bring myself to ask what the letters were. Even now, only that empty space remains.
Standing by the window where the cold air comes in, I traced with my fingertip the mark left on the rim of the mug you used. The warmth of the china against my fingertip had already gone cold.