I had no response to that.
The sentence sat between us on the counter. It was too honest to argue with and too generous to accept, so I let it exist in the space between those two things and said nothing.
He slid off the counter, rinsed his bowl, and stood in the doorway with an expression I was going to think about for a long time.
“Good night, Peter.”
“Good night, Benji.”
“Thank you. For the thing about the half second.”
“It’s just an observation.”
“It’s the best observation anyone’s made about me in years. I include Mia’s theory that I’m cosmically incapable of self-preservation, which was also pretty accurate.”
He drifted down the hall.
His door closed.
Princess Consuela chirped.
I sat at the island with my lukewarm tea and thought about the half second.
Not Benji’s.
Mine.
My two years of reaching for a second plate and pulling my hand back.
My two years of a manuscript that wouldn’t finish because finishing meant the book stopped being about David and started being about whatever came next.
My two years of walls and quiet hours and a blue mug that nobody else could touch because David had given it to me on a Tuesday morning in Portland for no reason other than that it was blue and he’d known it would make me smile, and letting someone else drink from it would mean the mug had moved on even if I hadn’t.
It was the half second between wanting something and allowing yourself to reach for it. I’d been living inside that half second since David died. I’d called it structure and routine and self-sufficiency and all the respectable names that grief wears when it wants to pass as a lifestyle.
Benji had a half second about dancing.
I had a half second aboutliving.
His was a studio on Kennedy that he drove past without looking.
Mine was a second plate I didn’t set out, a second mug I didn’t fill, a paragraph I couldn’t writebecause the next sentence was the one where David falls asleep against the car window and I watch him and know it’s the last good day, and writing that sentence meant arriving at the end, and the end meant there had to be a beginning of something else, and the something else was the part I’d been flinching away from for two years.
The stove light hummed above me.
Hiro sighed in his sleep from the bedroom.
The apartment held its breath the way it always did at that hour, suspended between one day and the next, between the life I’d built around David’s absence and whatever life was trying to build itself, quietly and without my permission, in the spaces Benji kept finding.
I washed my mug.
I didn’t go to my desk.
I didn’t open the laptop.
Instead, I went to my bookshelf, the one David had organized by the conversations between centuries. I pulled out a collection of Whitman that David had taught from and that still had his notes in the margins, his handwriting loose and excited, the handwriting of a man who had found something in a poem that he needed to share with a room full of teenagers.
I opened to a page David had dog-eared and readthe line he’d underlined twice.
