When you wake up each morning, he's there. It was kind of a novelty for a while, back when this life was new to you. But it's been a few years since then, and now it's just a part of your day, seeing him there, on your left. Some mornings, the day gets in the way and it won't wait, so you both get up and get moving without much ceremony. Others, there's more time, so you take it. And this morning, when he takes you – stale breath, mussed hair and all – you know there's nothing that's happened in your life up to now that you can honestly regret, because it's all brought you to this exact moment somehow.
There's just one bathroom in the apartment, so you share it. You lean your hip against the long counter next to him, brushing your teeth, and he stands next to you, shaving away his salt and pepper stubble. And there's a good chance that you'll do the same thing the next day because the stubble grows back quickly, and while he doesn't have much of a reason to keep clean-shaven these days, he doesn't have much of an excuse not to, either. Not like it once was, when even a quick pass of the razor at the end of a standarised sleep cycle was a self-indulgence that diverted too much time from the task at hand.
There's usually breakfast (though probably not as often as there should be) but there's always coffee, and it's better than what was ever stocked on any naval vessel, too.
Later on, you walk together to the grocery store, hand in hand most of the way. You don't have a list or anything, because he says he likes to play it by ear, as if you might happen upon something more exciting than a perfectly ripe bunch of bananas or some new kind of cereal. But there's a consistency to it, even if you do improvise the incidentals. No matter what goes into the cart, you watch him always pick out the best produce, and he always carries most of the bags on the walk home (no matter how much you sometimes protest), and then he sets the bags on the counter and methodically puts everything away in the same places as always.
It's the ordinary things that you appreciate the most, overall. The day to day activities; the conversations you have; the way his chest rises and falls in steady rhythm, and the way your own breath catches in your throat when he smiles at you in that one way – like he's just told you a secret or an inside joke. It's all those things that you've already lost once, technically, and that you almost lost a second time.
At the end of the day, you lay down together even if some nights, all these years on, you don't sleep much. Sometimes you make it through until the morning and wake up with him there, on your left; but sometimes you get up, while it's still dark and he's still asleep. You move slowly so as not to wake him, even though the muffled snores tell you it'd probably take more than a little jostling to do that. You get up and you might stay up the rest of the night, but you always head back to bed before morning. You get under the covers and you feel the heat coming off of him as it cuts through the coldness of the untouched sheets on your side of the bed, and you shift over towards him, your left arm pressing into his right. And that pressure is another one of those ordinary things that you appreciate, because it's yours to have now.