The Smell of Vanilla and Loss
The alarm hadn't gone off yet, but I was already awake, staring at the ceiling the way I did most mornings now, waiting for my body to remember why it felt heavy before my mind caught up with the reason. Four months. That was how long it had been since the world tilted and never quite righted itself again. Four months since the hospital smell, the hushed voices, the particular quality of silence that falls over a house when someone who used to fill it is suddenly gone.
I lay there a moment longer, listening. No creak of floorboards from my parents' room — my mother's room now, I supposed, though I still tripped over that word sometimes. No clatter of the coffee pot downstairs, no low murmur of the radio my father used to keep tuned to the local station just to hear another human voice while he shaved. Just the hush of early morning pressing against the windows, gray and patient.
I got up before the alarm could shatter that quiet, some instinct telling me it would feel like a violation, like screaming into a church.
The hallway was cold under my bare feet as I made my way toward the bathroom, and I noticed, the way I noticed every single day without meaning to, the changed…