We sat at a table that had learned how to hold us. It was wide enough for plates and elbows and the careful spill of a morning that had no intention of rushing. Brunch arrived: coffee steaming, two breakfast burritos sliced, butter melting as if it understood time better than we did. The conversation moved the way water does when it is glad to be water. Lively, but also listening. Insight folded into humor. A thought offered, and another returned brighter. We laughed—not to fill silence, but because the conversation asked for it. Everything felt copacetic, a word that suddenly made sense in the body, not just in my head.

The light leaned in. It filtered through dusty glass: dust and the modest ambition of the hour, casting warm colors that seemed borrowed from late afternoons and forgiven summers. Gold pooled at the edges of plates. Blue touched her hands. Even the shadows were kind. I then noticed the few gray hairs threading her head like annotations in a beloved book—evidence of time spent thinking, loving, enduring. They gave me a strange sense of victory, not over her, but over fear: I had not yet found one on my own head. Time had reached us unevenly, and for once, that felt like a gift. I realized how calm I was. How my shoulders had dropped without being asked. How my breath had slowed to match the pace of her words. There was no armor on me, no performance. Just this: the astonishing fact that this is the person I will be with until who knows when—hopefully until I die. The thought did not frighten me. It steadied me. It felt like standing on ground that recognizes her weight.

I tried to remember the last time I was this happy and failed. The memory would not surface. Instead, there was only this electric quiet, this thrilled and gently nervous joy, this table holding us while we learned how good it can be to stay.

Some time has gone by before I return to the same table as if it might remember me, as if the grain of the wood could recognize the weight of my absence and make room for it. The chair feels too honest. Without her, the surface offers nothing to lean into. I sit, then unravel. My hands clasp themselves the way strangers do in waiting rooms—too tight, too deliberate—and my knuckles blanched as if I could anchor myself there. I cannot recognize the me that was there then, and I wish I could tell myself then that I should be savoring the happiness in the moment, not replaying the great happiness later.

The window is still dirty. I cannot stop noticing it now. A smear catches the light and fractures the morning into something I don’t trust. I wish someone would clean it, though I know what I’m really asking for is clarity, or mercy, or a reason this hurts more than it should. My eyes fill. Tears arrive quietly, practicing restraint. They fall without witnesses. Everyone else is busy being themselves—laughing, scrolling, entertaining.

Maybe what I am left to find is relief in this invisibility. Life is easier once you accept that no one is paying attention to you, that your fracturing does not interrupt the room. But I am still nervous. Still afraid. “Everything I let go of has claw marks.”

A crisis does not manifest all at once; it accumulates. It is built from the moments I did not love well, from the sentences I never learned how to say aloud. It grows quietly while I am distracted, convinced that if I watch enough, read enough, stay busy enough, something will click into place. I fill my hours with stories that resolve themselves, hoping they will tutor me into completion. But the screen goes dark, the book closes, and I am still here, measuring my life against an unfinished ledger. Entertainment dulls the edges, but it cannot teach me how to begin.