my wrists remember the exact dip of the ceramic into the cupboard, the way my fingers automatically adjusted for the second mug, the one that used to meet another hand across the steam, and even now, seeing a flicker of that fresh, raw bewilderment in someone else’s eyes at St. Mark's, watching their own body betray them with these phantom gestures, it’s not the shock it once was, not that tearing open of the wound where every nerve ending screamed, but it’s a hum beneath the skin, a low vibration that echoes the specific memory my own muscles learned to hold, a landscape of absence so thoroughly mapped onto my own physical being that it sometimes feels like a shadow limb, still reaching, still expecting, even when the rest of me has learned to balance on this ground I’ve been building brick by painful brick, not quicksand anymore, thank god, just this solid earth that still knows the shape of what’s gone, still holds the memory like a fossil, tangible but not painful in the same gut-wrenching, breath-stealing way, just... there.