The most absurd thing to happen to me is that I stood in Sainsbury's today looking at dark chocolate with sea salt, the kind with the pretentious packaging, and thought: he would like this and then remembered that I will never get to tell him. That the verb tense changed without my permission. Would like. Past conditional. The grammar of ghosts. What do I even call you now not that we would speak. I would rather not. But you're this anonymous being, this entity that I can't name. Not my ex because that's too small. Not your name because that's too close. Just you. The pronoun that takes up every room in my head.

The most absurd thing is that I am brave. I am so brave it's boring. I show up. I smile in seminars. I cook for friends and no one can see that I am a city of ruins held together by routines.

The most absurd thing is that he is everywhere and nowhere. The coffee shop where we first spoke five minutes from my door. The university where he doesn't walk anymore. The park where we didn't. The bookstore where I can't. I hate Waterstones. Except I don't. I love Waterstones. I loved our Waterstones. I hate the Waterstones where the ghost of him picks up books on gardening, and the importance of rest. I hate that now I'm looking for fiction to hide in while his ghost reads about how to live better. London has become a museum of him and I am the only visitor who remembers what the plaques should say.

I'm learning to walk again. Not metaphorically. Actually. How to move through Bloomsbury without scanning for his silhouette. How to order coffee without the pause where I would have asked what he wanted. How to take up space that isn't shaped around him. This is me without you: smaller in some ways, larger in others. A different geometry.

The most absurd thing is not that it ended. It's that it ended and I still have to buy groceries. Still have to live in the city where we were never going to be what I thought we were.

The most absurd thing is that I know this poem by heart and I still can't believe I have to perform it.