I changed the bedsheets and felt lonelier than I expected

Dear Delyara, Fresh sheets usually make me feel better. Cleaner somehow. As if the room has agreed to begin again with me. But tonight, while I was pulling the corners tight and shaking out the duvet, I suddenly felt the loneliness of doing a task that used to belong to two people. Not because he was wonderful at helping. He wasn’t. But there is something about changing a bed alone that can remind you, very quickly, of the shape of absence. One person holding one side, another person lifting the mattress, another body built into the ordinary architecture of the room. Even a difficult marriage leaves domestic muscle memory behind. I finished making the bed, sat on the edge of it, and let the feeling come and go without trying to dramatize it. Some grief does not arrive in anniversaries. It arrives in fitted sheets and clean pillowcases.