What the Rooms Held After

The mug still holds the ring of your last coffee, tannin pressed to porcelain like a thumbprint, like something that meant to stay.

I find your hair in the drain, in the bristles of a brush you left because you had another — small abandonments the house catalogues without judgment.

The window you always opened is painted shut now, not by my hand, just by the slow adhesion of seasons that didn't know to leave a gap for you.

In the kitchen there is a drawer that only you knew how to close all the way, the trick of it, the lift-and-push. It hangs open still. I have not learned the angle.

This is how the rooms keep you: not in photographs or pressed flowers but in the unlearned gestures, the drawer that will not close, the window that will not open, the ring of you cooling in the cup.