Gold band, warm from my skin, worn smooth from five and a half years of never taking it off.
I don’t fidget with it consciously.
It’s just something my hands do when the rest of me goes still—a reminder, a tether, the last physical evidence that I belonged to someone and she belonged to me.
Rose Ann Simms.
Maiden name Dawson.
Earl’s only daughter.
Elementary school teacher at Sharp Primary.
Made the best chicken-fried steak in the county.
Sang off-key to Patsy Cline.
Cried at every dog food commercial.
Could make anyone feel like the most important person in the room just by looking at them.
Died at twenty-eight on a two-lane highway in the rain.
Five and a half years and I still reach for her side of the bed every morning.
Still hear her voice in certain rooms.
Still catch myself buying vanilla creamer at the grocery store because she liked it in her coffee and my brain hasn’t gotten the memo that no one’s drinking it.
Grief isn’t a thing you get over.
It’s a thing you absorb.
It gets into the soil of you, changes the composition, and everything that grows after comes up differently.
The man I was before Rose died—the one with the easy grin and the quick laugh, the one who played cards and won fifty bucks and walked outside to answer his wife’s call like it was the most natural thing in the world—that man doesn’t exist anymore.
I’m what’s left.
The after version.
Quieter. Harder.
Functional enough to do my job and fool most people into thinking I’m okay.
I’m not okay. I haven’t been okay since October 14th.
But the horses don’t care about me being okay.
They just care about consistency, and I can be consistent for them.
I can show up at the same time in the same place with the same steady presence, day after day, until something broken decides to trust me.
It’s the only thing I’m still good at.
The bay’s ears flick forward, then back.
He takes a step.
