The Shape of Days

The year took on a shape.

His days were quiet. Work in the morning, the kind of work that filled his screen but not his head. Cooking at noon because he had started cooking more intentionally since she mentioned it made her feel cared for from a distance. He would plate the food and take a photo and send it to her and she would reply with something sarcastic or something sweet depending on her mood and either one made the food taste better.

More work. Then the evening belonged to her. He would sit on his couch with his phone and wait for the call. Sometimes it came early. Sometimes late. Sometimes not at all because she was too tired or Lily needed her or the restaurant had kept her late. On those nights he would lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and the flat would feel like the inside of a shell. Hollow and smooth and too quiet.

Every other week his son was there and the flat had noise in it and the noise was good. Toy trains on the floor. Small shoes by the door. A voice asking for juice or a story or just saying dad for no reason other than to confirm he was still in the room. He loved those weeks. He loved them fiercely. But even in the middle of them, during the loud and warm and full parts, he would feel her absence like a thread pulled taut between his ribs. She was there and not there. Present in his thoughts even when his hands were full.

He would put his son to bed and then sit in the kitchen in the dark and call her and her voice would come through the phone and the flat would feel right again. Like the last piece of something clicking into place. Like the room had been waiting for that specific sound to complete itself.

She was becoming essential to him. Not in a desperate way. Not in the way that means you cannot function without someone. He functioned. He worked and parented and cooked and cleaned and existed like a person who had his life together. But underneath the functioning, underneath the ordinary machinery of his days, there was a current pulling toward her. Constant. Steady. Not dramatic. Just there. The way gravity is there. You don't notice it until you try to move against it and then you realize it has been holding you the whole time.

He noticed the way she had started to fill the spaces in his thinking.

He would be working and something would happen. A bug in the code. A client email. A cup of coffee going cold. And his first thought would be to tell her. Not because she would care about the bug or the email or the coffee. But because the telling had become the point. The sharing of small and unremarkable things had become the texture of his days. Without her to tell them to, the things felt less real. Less solid. Like they needed her attention to fully exist.

He caught himself doing it once. Mid afternoon. He had made a sandwich and it was a good sandwich and he had picked up his phone to photograph it before he realized what he was doing. He put the phone down. Ate the sandwich. It tasted fine but the act of eating it without sending her the photo felt incomplete. Like watching a film with the sound off.

He picked the phone back up and took the photo anyway.

She said: That's a good sandwich.

He said: It is. I'm talented.

She said: At sandwiches.

He said: Among other things.

She said: Name three.

He said: Sandwiches. Staying up too late. Thinking about you.

She didn't reply for ten minutes. Then she said: You can't just say that.

He said: I just did.

She said: I know. That's the problem.

The wanting was there too. Not just the emotional wanting, though that was vast and deep and sometimes overwhelming. The physical wanting. The ache of knowing what she looked like and not being able to reach her.

He would look at the first photo. The pumpkin pajamas. The strip of skin across her middle. The beanie and the hair falling everywhere. He would look at it and feel something stir in his chest and lower and he would close the photo and open it again and close it.

He didn't tell her about those moments. Not often. Once in a while, late at night, when the conversation was soft and unguarded, he would say something. Not graphic. Not pushing. Just honest.

He said once: I think about you at night. I have for a while. Not just your mind, though that too. You. All of you.

She said: Oh.

A long pause.

She said: What do you think about?

He said: Your hands. What they would feel like. Your neck. What it would be like to put my mouth there. Your voice when you're tired. What it would sound like close to my ear instead of through a phone.

She was quiet for a long time.

She said: That's. A lot.

He said: Too much?

She said: No. Not too much. Just. I don't know how to do this part. I told you that.

He said: I know. You don't have to do anything. I just wanted you to know you're not alone in the wanting.

She said: I think about you too. Sometimes. At night. I don't know what to do with it either.

He held onto that for weeks. Her voice saying those words. The admission of it. Small and careful and real.