Five days

Five days from now will mean one half year from losing her. My weight is down over 50 pounds, but I feel the heaviness of my heart increasing.

I feel it as I run into the night, hoping to outpace my sorrows with steps and heartbeats.

I feel it as I ponder my work and the meaningless struggle to procure money for children who are sneered at by selfish gray people who would see them imprisoned before they were educated.

I feel it as I consider the future with women ahead of me, in all their sadness or greed or heartless demand for comforting falsity.

I feel it as I gaze into a picture of beautiful blue eyes and know that a great and perfect love is gone from me, perhaps forever.

I feel it as I try to gather the courage and the motivation to pour out her life in verse and chapter as I know it, and her memorial as I realize it.

I feel it as I listen to my body for the little signs that say I will not live to honor her, to immortalize her, and to be known to have been hers at all, except as a rumor that dies with the last that have heard it from some reverent voice.

And I cannot feel so much so often and so deeply anymore without someone, and I feel my greatest grief when I admit I know she was right, and I must love to live, and I must live to love again.

And I wish she could live, so all of that, all of these weights, could feel so much less of a burden and a stone in me, and so much more a matter of my grateful love for her, as it always had been.

But at least my shoulders are broad and my back is unbowed, and much of that is her, alive in me and insistent that I carry her, and it, on.

F.