A Table for Two, Forever

I have this void in my chest that I keep trying to fill by walking into expensive cafés and ordering overpriced slices of blueberry or Biscoff cheesecake. I like things almost unbearably sweet. Maybe because bitterness has never needed any help finding me.

So I keep moving from one café to another. Sometimes I tell myself I'm bored. Sometimes I need somewhere to read or write. Sometimes I just don't want to be at home. But there is always the void. It comes with me. I have tried changing the scenery around it, as if emptiness can be fooled by a different street, a different table, a different playlist, a different cake. It can't. Every café is different, but I keep meeting the same version of myself inside all of them.

There is something comforting about sitting among strangers. Nobody asks why you're there. Nobody knows what happened to you. You can be completely alone without looking like you've been abandoned. For a few hours, I am just another girl sitting at a table, waiting for her food.

One cold evening, I walk into yet another café and order the same thing I always do, blueberry cheesecake and a flat white. The waitress brings them over and asks if I need anything else. I tell her, "No, this is just right. Thanks." Clairo is playing quietly in the background. A couple sits across from me, arguing in whispers. I eat my cheesecake while scrolling through my phone, watching videos without really seeing them. My thumb moves. The screen changes. My mind stays somewhere else, scrolling past a café review, an aesthetic carousel post, a table by a window, a little plate, two drinks. Then I see something familiar. We had been there once. It hits me with the kind of force that makes you forget where you are. For a few seconds, I am not in this café anymore. I am somewhere else. With him.

It has been almost a year since he died.

That is the strange thing about grief. You can change everything around you and still arrive at the same absence. You can change streets, tables, cafés, people, routines. None of it changes the fact that someone is missing. People talk about missing someone as though it is an emotion. Something invisible. Something that happens inside your head. But sometimes I can feel mine. It sits behind my ribs. It has weight. It follows me into crowded rooms. It sits across from me at restaurants. It takes the empty chair beside me.

When someone dies, you don't only lose the time you had with them. You lose the time you assumed was waiting for you. The birthdays. The stupid arguments. The grocery runs. The cancelled plans. The coffees they would have complained about. The places they would have gone. The people they would have met. The person they would have become. That is the part of death nobody prepares you for. The person is gone, but so are all the ordinary days that never got the chance to happen. Maybe that is why the smallest memories hurt the most.

I remember the way he said my name when he was irritated. I remember the stupid face he made when something tasted bad. I remember the way he held a cup. I remember that he hated coffee. He always said it tasted like burnt water. Then he'd order one anyway. I'd ask him why. He'd shrug and say, "It makes me look sophisticated." He always finished my food too. I'd eat the best part and leave the rest behind, and he'd steal it from my plate while I'd pretend to be annoyed. At the time, none of it seemed worth remembering. Why would it? There was supposed to be another meal. Another coffee. Another afternoon.

Nobody thinks, while someone is stealing the last bite from their plate, remember this.

Nobody thinks they are living through something for the last time. We are terrible at understanding that ordinary moments are already becoming memories. I wish I had known. I wish I had looked at him longer. Stayed five minutes more. Complained less. Told him I loved him one more time. But grief gives you an entire dictionary of maybe and never gives you a sentence you can actually use. Maybe I should have called. Maybe I should have stayed. Maybe I should have noticed. Maybe there was something I could have done.

There is no amount of maybe that can turn a dead person back into a living one. Eventually, regret becomes another way of trying to negotiate with reality.

And reality doesn't negotiate.

So you learn to live with unfinished things. The world around you doesn't become unfinished just because your life has. People still go to work. Someone still burns their toast. Someone falls in love. Someone complains about an exam. Someone orders cheesecake for two. Cafés open in the morning and close at night. The sun rises over the same buildings. That used to feel almost offensive. How could everything look so normal? Nothing looks different when someone dies. That is part of the cruelty. The same roads are there. The same songs play. The same people laugh. The same waiter asks whether you want your coffee hot or cold. The only difference is that one person is missing from the frame. And somehow that one missing person can make the entire picture feel wrong. People eventually stop asking about him. Not because they stop caring. They just don't know what to do with grief that doesn't disappear on schedule.

At first they ask if you're okay. You say you're fine. Then they ask less. Eventually, you realise that the person who died is becoming past tense to everyone else while some part of you is still waiting for him to walk through a door. I still have a life. That sometimes feels like betrayal. I still laugh. I still get annoyed. I still listen to music. I still make plans. I still discover songs I like. I still go out. I still order cheesecake. Sometimes I forget. For a second, I forget. And then I remember that there is no one to tell. That is when I understood that grief isn't really about learning to stop missing someone. It is learning what to do with the fact that missing them has become part of your life. People like to call it moving on, but moving on to where? To a life where he doesn't exist? That life is already here.

I am living it.

There is nowhere to move to. There is only learning how to walk around the missing piece. Learning which photographs you can look at. Which songs you can hear. Which memories you can touch without reopening everything. And sometimes you don't want to be careful. Sometimes the pain is the last place where the person still exists. I think that is why I keep going to cafés. Not because I think I'll find him there. I know I won't. I'm looking for places where his absence hasn't arrived before me. Outside, my grief has a biography. There are people who know his name. People who know what happened. People who know who I was before he died and who I became afterwards.

But inside a café full of strangers, I have no history. I am just a girl sitting alone with a cheesecake. Nobody knows there is a void inside my chest. Nobody knows I am carrying a person who is no longer alive or that something happened to me almost a year ago that still happens to me every day. And I like it that way. For a few hours, I don't have to be the girl who lost someone. I can sit by the window. I can listen to Clairo. I can complain about bad coffee. I can watch a couple argue over something that will probably be forgotten by tomorrow. I can watch someone laugh and chatter. I can be nobody. Sometimes that is enough.

Remembering someone means holding on to every detail. It is remembering that there was once a person who hated coffee but ordered it anyway. A person who stole food from my plate. A person who had no idea that one day I would be sitting alone somewhere, trying to look back to what it felt like to have him sitting across from me. I don't know what happens to love when the person it belongs to dies. I don't know whether it disappears or changes shape. Maybe it becomes memory. Maybe it becomes habit. Maybe it becomes the instinct to turn around when you hear a familiar voice.

Maybe it becomes a void.

I know mine is still there. I can feel it even when I'm happy. Especially then, sometimes. It doesn't mean I want to be swallowed by it. It doesn't mean I want to spend the rest of my life grieving. It just means there is a place inside me that knows someone is missing. For a long time, I thought I had to fill that place. Maybe that was the mistake. Maybe the void was never asking to be filled. Maybe it is simply the shape grief takes when love has nowhere else to go.

The café continues around me. Someone opens the door and cold air comes in. A waitress carries two plates past my table. The music changes. Someone laughs near the counter. Nothing stops. He does not return. The void does not close. And yet, somehow, I get up. I put my coat on. I pay. I leave. There will be another café tomorrow. Another table. Another menu. Another cake I will probably finish. Another coffee I probably won't. Maybe one day I will walk into one and not think of him at all. Maybe one day I will see a table for two and only see a table. Maybe one day his absence won't arrive with me. I don't know. For now, I keep going. Not because I am running away from him. Not because I am trying to forget him. Because I am still here. And I am beginning to understand that my life continuing does not make his absence any less real. I can miss him and still keep living. I will carry the things that are left. The coffee. The stolen bites. The irritated way he said my name. The small, stupid memories I never knew I would need.

I will carry them.

And I will keep living around the space they left behind. I don't go to cafés because I think I'll find him there. I go because, for a few hours, nobody knows he's gone.