The kitchen windowsill is lined with prescription bottles. I count out your pills and set them on the counter. Pour you a glass of orange juice. Put the coffee on. I can hear you in the bathroom, performing your daily beauty chores. Faucet running, dryer blowing, the clatter of makeup in the sink. On the table, there are the tulips from our anniversary. Already, their heads are too heavy for their stems. You once told me they are the loveliest of flowers to watch die. Long ago, a tulip was just a tulip. This is so long ago, it is a time I can barely remember, a time before you. Before your love for this flower spilled over into my life. This is how something simple, something in this world, something that just is, takes on meaning. I know many facts about tulips, but I will not recite them now. I can feel them elbowing each other, grasping for purchase in my head—competition for a metaphor—but really all that matters is you love this flower and I love you. Always I thought I’d keep books for company. While that is still true—they cover our mantel, they clutter our bedroom, they fill the walls, our books—it became, somehow, a lesser truth. And I am happy for it. You are making your way down the hall now, I can hear you. You will make a fuss about taking the pills, as you do every morning. You will shake your head in that way when you drink the juice. And you will sit at the table, where I will be drinking my coffee, eating my banana, reading my book. If there were a signature pose, a moment I’m most myself, it is this one: reading, but not reading, anticipating your entrance into the room, looking up from the page too soon. It is not so much that we have spent our lives in this way—our time together cannot be weighed in the currency of bananas or books or even tulips—but that after all these years, it still brings me pleasure, your comment upon entering the kitchen, on how lovely they look, there, on the table, dying over the lip of the vase: the tulips, their sloping grace.