100 Words

6: After Charles
It was not an easy thing after Charles left. There were Charles shaped holes everywhere I looked – in the clothes closet, in his chair by the fireplace, in my bed. It took me a long while to not make his breakfast beside mine. Four eggs and toast was not more difficult than two. The difficulty was in remembering how to cook only two. Like Proust’s storied madeleine, a wealth of memory bottomed up with each egg. And what is perhaps most odd was that I had no intention of filling that hole. Charles had left, and the whole remained.