30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 30, Remnants

There were the remnants of the day on the kitchen table, like any day. And she looked at them, and sighed, and wished they would all be put away, and thought: perhaps tomorrow. The empty milk carton, the product of a week of cereal eating by her and her love, and the cash he had left her for the tolls, the ipod he had attached to the computer and forgotten upon the table after it was charged, his ever-present concern to have music around him surfacing again after a week of stressful, time-consuming work for both of them.
Books, her contribution, constantly inundating surfaces in waves of new releases and old favorites, always toppling between the two boundaries of her life - from the library and back to it like the tides. And the shopping list and its notepad, yellow and crumpled, with the every-day memories written on it like a palimpsest, sheets and sheets of the memories of hours and days, the have-tos, duties, and needs that they planned and fulfilled together.
The things she sighed and wished would be put away.
Until the day she realized it was the very thing she loved so much. The day she realized he wouldn't come home again, and she left all the things there, like smears of life and love, until they became dusty. She picked up the money and his ipod, she turned them in her hands, and felt the ghost of his placing them there, carelessly, carefully for her. And she cried and wished it all undone, but it was done, and so she sat at the table, like sitting at a piece of art, a memorial. And wondered why so much of her life had been putting things away.