I still have a hard time accepting the fact that she’s gone. I’m always looking around, sort of expecting her to walk into view. I went down to the store on the corner this morning, intent on purchasing a few things I needed. Oh, and breakfast, too. I’ve been having to remind myself to eat lately.

So I walked in there, grabbed a can of shaving cream, and reached for a cheese danish. Just as my hand touched the plastic wrapper, though, a shiver ran through me. I mean, I actually shuddered. I started thinking about what it would be like if Alameda were there. She had never liked those prepackaged foods much. She would have laughed at me and walked to another aisle, breezily searching for something better.

I could almost see her spinning through the place in that crisp morning-and-fluorescent light, picking things up and putting them down again. We had come there a lot of mornings together.

Her thing with the pastries and the little cakes and the donuts was that they didn’t leave her satisfied at all. They never filled her up, she said, and all that sugar gave her a headache. Besides, they didn’t have any vitamins in them, nothing that would really do anything for you.

So this morning I wandered around there for close to a half-hour, looking for things with vitamins, but not actually buying any of them. I seemed to forget what I had come in there for anyway. In the end I walked out with the shaving cream, a pack of Alameda’s favorite kind of gum, and two cups of coffee- one for me, and one for her.

It wasn’t until I got back to my apartment that I remembered she wasn’t there. She’d never be there anymore. I took the coffee that I had bought for her, and I poured it all over her African violet, the one that she had loved so damn much but neglected to take with her.