Inventory of a Borrowed Kitchen

The kettle belongs to someone else's mornings. Its whistle knows a name I have not learned, a hand that reaches without looking.

I open drawers and find the grammar of a stranger: forks nested like quiet arguments, a spoon bent from stirring too much sugar, three corks saved for a reason that left the room years ago.

The window over the sink frames a pear tree I did not plant. Light arrives anyway, washes the countertop in its indifferent gold, and the day begins to rehearse itself in a kitchen still learning my footsteps.

Tonight I will cook something simple — garlic, oil, the last of the bread — and the walls will remember it the way walls remember everything: faintly, without judgment, without me.