[ WP ] Every morning she puts on her sweats , laces her shoes , downs some coffee , and goes running with a dead man .

It only takes one day to break a habit. 
 
 Susannah wakes up promptly at her alarm and rolls out of bed with her normal, sleepy regret, and heads to the bathroom. She stares at herself in the mirror. She ’ s 32, but looks five years younger, a feature her friends regularly comment upon. You ’ re still young, they tell her, and maybe you should act that way. 
 
 It ’ s not even light outside as she changes clothes out of her pajamas into her sweats and laces up her shoes, all brightly colored, all cute, all easily drawing the attention of everyone that would see her pass. It was her trademark from when she was little, and it had worked in her favor once before, certainly it would work again. It isn ’ t something she ’ s thinking much about this early morning. 
 
 Habits. She ’ s really tired. Work has been stressful, and Susannah has found herself staying later and later in an effort to stay ahead of the game. You ’ re becoming a workaholic, her boss teased her last night. Go out some. She had smiled, but stayed another hour to finish up her report. 
 
 Coffee was one of the few vices she had picked up along the way. It was inevitable, she supposes, when you lived with a former barista and a connoisseur, or so he said. Coffee snob and hipster, she had said. Nevertheless, he had gotten her hooked on the stuff, and now she sat at her large kitchen table, enjoying a cup of coffee, his favorite brand. She doesn ’ t want to think about it. 
 
 The next alarm on her phone goes off and she eyes it warily. She slowly gets up from the table and abandons her half-finished cup of coffee. She picks up the aging iPod from the shelf, off the charger. He had been a strange one, refusing to move his music to his phone, or any device that was made in the last ten years. If it works, why replace it? As a former starving artist, he was thrifty to the extreme, and she had loved it and hated it. Still loves it and hates it. 
 
 She puts the headphones in and she hears it, his music, and it soars. She finds herself moving outside, locking the door behind her, and running to one of his sonatas, continuing a tradition they had started with one another years ago and now she continues to shoulder on her own. 

