The Sound of Forgotten Things

The tea always tasted the same in that chipped ceramic mug—burnt sugar, a trace of cardamom, and something else I could never quite name. Something bitter. Something unfinished. It still sits on the windowsill, gathering dust, catching the blue morning light like it used to when you were here. I haven’t used it in months, maybe years. But I can’t throw it away.

It’s strange, isn’t it, the things we keep long after they stop being useful?

Like that cracked mug.

Like your last voicemail.

Like the way I still reach for the second toothbrush.

People say time heals. That it softens sharp memories, sands down the rough edges of loss until all that remains is a gentle ache. But no one talks about how some things sharpen with time. How silence, for example, grows teeth. How absence carves itself into the walls of a home.

I didn’t notice it at first. After you left, everything looked the same. The plants still leaned toward the window. The clock still ticked. Your coat still hung by the door, as if waiting for your hand. But slowly, the stillness changed color. The house began to echo in strange ways. I heard footsteps when there were none. I whispered your name in empty rooms just to see how it felt. I started talking to the air like it was listening.

Some mornings, I forget. I wake thinking I’ll find you in the kitchen, making too-strong coffee and humming songs you never knew the words to. I reach out for warmth that isn’t there. And then it all comes back, the slow tide of remembering. You’re gone. Still gone. Always gone.

I thought I could train myself to move on. I rearranged the furniture. Painted the walls. Bought new sheets. I changed everything except the only thing that mattered—my heart still folds itself into your shape every night.

You used to say that everything has a sound. Even forgotten things. That silence is just a conversation waiting to be heard.

I hear you most in the quiet. In the whir of the fan. In the soft thud of mail hitting the floor. In the kettle’s long sigh. Sometimes I wonder if memory has a frequency—one that hums low in the bones, like an old radio between stations.

I kept your books. Not all of them, just the ones with your notes in the margins. Pages where you argued with the author, where your handwriting tilted left in irritation or looped gently in joy. I run my fingers over the ink sometimes, like I’m tracing the path back to you.

There’s a photograph on the fridge of us laughing. I don’t remember who took it or why we were laughing. But I keep it there like a lighthouse. A reminder that joy existed once—and might, just might, return.

Grief is not a straight road. It circles back. It hides in songs, in smells, in sudden tears at the grocery store. Sometimes it dances, sometimes it drags. But always, it teaches.

I’ve learned to carry it differently now. Not like a wound, but like a story. A sacred weight. A love that didn’t end, only changed form. People talk of moving on. I prefer the idea of moving with. You are with me in every breath I take. Not haunting me. Holding me.

I write now, mostly in the mornings. When the world is quiet and the tea steams gently in that chipped mug. I write letters I’ll never send. Stories you’ll never read. But still, I write. Because you once told me that writing is remembering out loud.

So here I am.

Remembering.

Out loud.

And somewhere, I hope you’re listening.