First Light

The room was quiet in the way rooms are only quiet before someone has woken in them. Dust turned in the new light, unhurried, like it had been doing this long before me and would go on long after.

He had left his shirt on the back of the chair and the coffee going cold on the sill, and I stood there in the doorway and let myself have the whole of it — the mess, the light, the ordinary evidence of a man who had been happy here — before I said anything at all.

That is the thing nobody tells you about wanting: it does not end when you finally have what you wanted. It just goes quiet. It turns into something with a name and a face and a habit of leaving the light on.