I Keep Waiting to Miss Him

the last car left around midnight. aunts hugging too long in the driveway, the motion light catching them, everybody saying call me if you need anything in that voice that means please don't. now it's just me and a kitchen full of food i didn't make. the fridge won't close right, packed with casserole dishes that all have names taped to the bottom in masking tape so you know whose to return. tupperware diplomacy. i've been standing here reading the names.

everyone cried today. i watched myself not. i did the face, i held my mother's arm, i said the lines. but i kept being somewhere just behind my own eyes, waiting for the thing to land, and it didn't. it still hasn't.

here's the part i wouldn't say with the lights on. when the hospice nurse called it, the first thing i felt wasn't grief. it was that i could breathe out. like i'd been holding a plank for two years and someone finally said you can stop. i've been so ashamed of that breath i can't tell anyone. i keep thinking i'm broken, that the missing is coming and i deserve how much it'll hurt when it does.

i just put his glasses in my pocket without deciding to. they were on the counter, folded. i've been carrying them around the empty house for an hour. so maybe it's already here and it just doesn't look like crying. maybe this is what it looks like on me.