The Space Beside Me

In memory of Richard — the gentle rhythm that once echoed beside mine.

“Every space once shared carries the echo of a life well-lived.”

It’s strange, the way silence can hold a memory.
Sometimes it’s not the absence of sound, but the absence of a soul.
Richard’s car had always been there—his steady rhythm beside mine in the garage, his quiet presence tucked between concrete and daybreak.

He was thin and mostly bald, his gait slow but sure, the cane an extension of his will. We’d exchange our small pleasantries, those little gifts of humanity that mean more than we admit.

Then, one day, the space beside me was empty.
And it stayed that way.

Mom told me he’d been in an accident—something about his eyes, and a rental car too big to park.
I felt the kind of relief that comes with conditions—grateful he was alive, uneasy that I hadn’t seen him.
He’d told her not to worry about him, she said. That’s the kind of man he was—quietly independent, gently proud.

Still, the silence had a pulse.
Still, I worried.

This morning, as I packed my bag for an overnight stay with Snow White Willa and the Seven Kitties, the world broke open with sirens.
Red and blue light strobed through the autumn leaves, reflecting off my window like ghosts of the living and the gone.
From my third-floor view, I watched as a gurney rolled out but returned with nothing more than a red and black backpack—the final footprint of a life folded neatly away.

Mom later told me she’d seen sheets on the ground.
“It looked like a mound of snow,” she said softly.
And in her voice was a tremor I recognized—the sound of grief trying to stay composed.

By the time I passed the garage, the air had thickened. Cameras flashed toward the balconies. The world had gone dim, even though the sun was still shining.

Hours later, when Mom called, she didn’t have to say his name.
I already knew.
“It was Richard,” she whispered, and the words lingered like the faintest prayer.

Now, rain falls against the windows where I sit with Willa and her cats.
The air smells of damp leaves and fur, and the rhythmic purrs sound like small engines of comfort.
Outside, autumn’s colors burn brilliantly—yellow, orange, crimson—a holy fire fading into the earth. The sun keeps slipping behind clouds, like it can’t decide whether to mourn or to bless.

I sip my tea and listen to the rain’s steady percussion, and in that rhythm, I hear Richard’s cane again.
Tap… pause… tap.
The gentle insistence of a life that kept moving, even when the steps grew slow.

The space beside me remains empty now,
but somehow—
I don’t think it ever truly will be.