He’s been gone eleven months and I still buy the bigger yogurt. Still reach for two mugs when I make coffee, every single morning, and only notice halfway through pouring that one of them is going to sit there untouched until I wash it out of guilt around dinnertime.

I know exactly what I’m doing when I do it. That’s the part I can’t explain to anyone. It’s not forgetting — forgetting would almost be a relief. It’s that for three or four seconds before I catch myself, the kitchen has him in it again. The radio’s on the station he liked. There’s a second plate warming in my head before I even register I’ve only cooked for one.

My sister thinks I should get rid of his mug specifically, the chipped blue one, like that’s the load-bearing object in all this. It isn’t. I could throw out every single thing he ever touched and I’d still reach for a second cup tomorrow, because the habit was never really about the mug. It was about the eleven years before it, the version of my mornings where reaching for two was just what my hands did without asking my brain first.

People keep telling me it gets easier with time, and I believe them, mostly. But nobody mentioned that “easier” doesn’t mean the reflex goes away — it means you get faster at catching it, quieter about it, better at turning the second mug back into the cupboard before anyone sees you’ve already taken it down. I’m very good at that part now. I don’t know if that counts as healing or just getting better at hiding.