Closer again in 2023

It’s been 301 days since you left me. Somehow the last 10 months have felt like you were drifting further and further from me and the awful day but since the new year it’s been different ..

I know the awful day is coming again .. to mark an entire year since you left. Rather than feeling further away, it feels closer now.

I know I’ll relive it but I relive it every single day so that doesn’t really scare me. I suppose I keep going over it in my head because it was the very last time I saw you as you - in our home, not a funeral home. In our bed, not a casket.

Those horrifying 4 minutes together before police and paramedics flooded our space .. they almost seem as special to me as the moment I laid eyes on you for the very first time in person after almost a decade of friendship.

I can play that memory in my head just as easily as I can the awful day, but it teases my emotions so much more .. look what you had, you don’t have it anymore .. this is what happened, that awful day.

I don’t post as much about you on FB anymore .. I want to keep the memories to myself now. I feel like everyone must think, geezus we know you loved him but c’mon it’s long past time to move on.

Perhaps it is. You’ve been gone almost a year, Babes. A year. What the fuck. I have no intention whatsoever of moving on .. I mean, I guess I have the intention in the way that I know I need to leave here soon but … given that there’s no way to do that, I just ignore it.

It’s so fucking confusing. I want to leave here because I can’t afford to stay on my own but also because everything here is you .. your hometown, your family, your old elementary school, your ball diamonds, your memories, our life together … I should want that, right? But I don’t. And it hurts that I don’t.

Confusing.

I want quiet, not city. Small. Even smaller than our apartment. Me and my dogs. In the middle of nowhere. A witch in the woods. A little garden. A few chickens. Solitude. Where I can grieve you every single day in my own way for the rest of my life.

It’s not what we dreamed of. It’s not the future we planned.

But it’ll have to do now …