Dear You,

I don't know how to start this, which is stupid because I never had trouble talking to you when you were here. I could say anything. We could sit in comfortable silence or talk for three hours about nothing and it all felt the same — easy, real, ours. But now I'm writing words you'll never read, and I'm doing it anyway, because the alternative is keeping all of this inside and I'm running out of room.

I'm angry at you. I need to get that out first because it's the biggest thing and it's taking up all the space. I'm so goddamn angry that you're gone. I'm angry that you left me here to figure out how to exist without you. I'm angry that the world didn't stop — that the sun came up the next morning like nothing happened, that people were still going to work and buying coffee and complaining about traffic while my entire universe had a hole blown through it. I'm angry that I have to do all of this — the paperwork, the phone calls, the "I'm fine" face, the getting out of bed — without you.

I know it's not your fault. I know you didn't choose this. But I'm angry anyway, and you'd understand that because you always understood the irrational stuff. You never tried to logic me out of my feelings. You just let me have them. So I'm having them now, and they're big, and they're ugly, and they're all for you.

The Mundane Stuff I Can't Tell You

The kitchen faucet is leaking again. I know you'd have fixed it in twenty minutes with that one wrench and a YouTube video. I called a plumber. It cost $200 and it still drips a little. You would've been insufferable about that, and I would've given anything to hear you say "I told you so."

Your plant is still alive. The one you swore I'd kill within a week. I water it every Sunday because you told me to, and I talk to it sometimes because that's apparently who I am now — a person who talks to a plant because the person who gave it to me is dead. It's thriving, by the way. Spite is apparently an excellent fertilizer.

I made your recipe last week. The one you never wrote down, the one I always said you needed to write down, the one you swore you'd remember forever. I got it mostly right. The seasoning was off. I ate it standing over the sink and cried, which is a thing I do now — I combine eating and crying into one efficient activity. You'd hate that. You'd tell me to sit down at the table like a person.

The dog still waits by the door at 5:30. Every single day. I don't know how to explain it to a dog. I don't know how to explain it to myself.

The Big Things

I got the promotion. The one I was scared to go for, the one you spent an entire dinner convincing me I deserved. You were right. You were always right about the things I couldn't see in myself. I wanted to call you the second I found out. I picked up my phone and got halfway through dialing before my brain caught up. That was a bad day.

Someone asked me where I see myself in five years. I used to know the answer to that. Every version of my five-year plan had you in it. Now I can't see past next week. The future is this big blank space where you were supposed to be, and I don't know how to want things anymore. Everything I used to want was either with you or for you or because of you, and now I have to figure out what I want for just me, and honestly? I don't know yet. I'm working on it. Be patient with me, wherever you are.

I wish you could have met the person I'm becoming. I think you'd like them. They're sadder than the version you knew, and angrier, and they cry at commercials now. But they're also stronger in ways that surprise me. They've learned to ask for help, which you always said I was terrible at. They've learned to sit with pain instead of running from it. They've learned that love doesn't end when someone dies — it just changes shape and becomes this thing you carry everywhere, heavy and precious and impossible to put down.

The Love That Has Nowhere to Go

That's the part nobody talks about, by the way. Everyone focuses on the loss, the absence, the empty chair. Nobody talks about the love that's still here. Because it didn't leave when you did. It's still inside me — all of it, every bit — and it has nowhere to go.

I still love you in present tense. Not "loved." Love. I love you the way I always have, except now it's just me holding it, and there's no one on the other end to catch it. It's like shouting into a canyon and never hearing the echo. The love goes out and it just... keeps going. Into the void. Into the nothing where you used to be.

People say "they'll always be with you" and I know they mean well but it's bullshit. You're not with me. You're not here. What's with me is the memory of you, the echo of you, the shape you left in my life. And I'm grateful for that, I am, but it's not the same as you. It's not your laugh or your hands or the way you'd fall asleep on the couch five minutes into any movie made before 1990.

I miss you in ways I don't have words for, and I have a lot of words. I miss you in the morning and at 3 a.m. and in the grocery store and in the car and in every room of this house and in every version of my future. I miss you in the spaces between my ribs.

I don't know if you can hear this. I don't know if there's a "this" for you anymore, or if you're just gone — really, fully, completely gone. I hope you're somewhere. I hope it's good. I hope you know I love you. I hope you know that I'm angry and wrecked and barely holding it together, but I'm holding it together, and some of that strength is because of you.

Save me a seat. I have more to tell you.

Always, Me