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We spent the mornings talking over empty plates about love and other quiet tragedies. You would read the paper and comment on spelling errors, I’d tell you the history of some empire or another in small instalments. You had the air of a Byzantine prince, all beauty, all sneer. We swapped confessions of familiarity, a dance of legs crossing and shifting under the table, the pirouette of plates being switched for mugs, mugs for glasses of water, water for softening grapes.

When the weather was good, the kitchen door would stand ajar, and the symphony of neighbours’ morning clattering would tumble into our ears, the click of porcelain, the stirrings of conversation. The birds would sing too, leaves would sway, the insects would breach new territory into the wilting garden beds we always forgot to water.

And even in winter, the sunlight always rose in a sloped angle, arching over your head as if it were a compass point, it was comforting that something else orbited you, made it feel less accident more science. I’d blink into the halo of dust and refracted light strewn around your head, and you’d read the spelling errors left on my clumsy features.

Sometimes, we’d talk about God, normally in the context of music. You thought religion lay like a crocodile under the algae ponds of breakfast radio shows, that every four chords could spell angel, creator, or any other such thing. I thought he hid in plain sight, in infrastructure and streetlights and graffiti. We never prayed, so it shouldn’t have mattered. But you had the glow of a saint in the mornings and I couldn’t help but wonder.

We danced the mornings away, the crockery twirled in and out of cupboard and sink, the toast up and down like tides, we spoke of love and other quiet tragedies as other people’s lives unravelled metres away. We fancied ourselves the architects of idle conversation, but now you’re gone I’m only now realising we never spoke of anything but religion, as I told you of the Mongols, and you told me they’d missed a comma on page five, and we worshipped the moments of light arcing over us both, our hands trained to touch at every turn of the page, our silence a prayer for time to carry us two on its back like a great turtle slipping into limitless seas.