The photograph is from Myrtle Beach, 2019. Four of us on the boardwalk, sunburned and squinting. There's a gap where he used to stand, scissors taken to the image with a steady hand. That hand wasn't mine.
I found the photo in a box I'd shipped from the old house. Tucked beneath a prescription bottle with his name still on the label, expired fourteen months ago. I held both for a long time before putting them in the trash. Then I took the photo back out.
My physical therapist says the body holds on to what the mind tries to file away. She's working on my shoulder, frozen for months from sleeping curled up on one side of a bed built for two.
I started over in this apartment three weeks ago. Bare walls, a mattress on the floor, a single fork in the drawer. Every morning I make the bed like someone might see it, even though no one will.
Today I taped the photograph to the fridge. The gap and all. Not as a memorial. As proof that someone stood there once and now doesn't, and I'm still standing in the frame.