First posted March 2024.

I thought it was so unfair of you. I’d heard those stories, passed around in clickbait listicles by family members you don’t talk to on Facebook or retold by a friend of a friend of a friend in the grocery store, of the way lost loved ones visit the living. A girl who lost her father being followed by his favourite bird everywhere she goes, or someone noticing lost pennies on the pavement everywhere they went after losing their favourite aunt. The sort of things you hear from otherwise sensible people and can reply with nothing but a nod, knowing you have to let people have the harmless beliefs that keep them going.

Of course, I was a sensible person who wouldn’t believe in foolish superstition. But when I lost you, I couldn’t help but look out of the corner of my eye, wait half a second before making each turn just in case I missed your sign. I made myself dizzy trying to smell freesias in the air, straining my neck looking for starlings in the grey skies. I tried to spin rationalities from every chance encounter; once we went to the zoo and a butterfly landed on your shoulder, so maybe you were in the butterfly that tried to land on mine in the bank’s parking lot.

At first, I told myself it was stupid to expect your return. I was asking the impossible of you, and I knew better. But I couldn’t stop myself from wanting it, and in wanting and not getting, growing angry with you. How dare you leave me here alone? How dare you not come back for me, when I would’ve wrestled the limitations of physics themselves to come back to you?

You were everything to me —and in having the thought, I realised what it meant. The fault was never yours, but mine. I don’t know why I expected you to be less to me in death than you were in life.

You were everything, and you are everything. You are the dancing motes of dust in rays of warm sunlight. You are the crackle of the old stereo in the kitchen while I make my morning coffee. You are the smell of cinnamon and vanilla floating out of our favourite bakery. You are the cat who sleeps on the brick wall I walk past on my way to work, and the swan serenely gliding across the park’s pond at dusk.

I’m not yet so well-adjusted that I wouldn’t rather have you here. But how lucky I am, that I have you everywhere.