20 Sundays

This is my 20th Sunday without her. (I guess it’s everyone’s 20th Sunday without her.)

So since I have very little to do in my life anymore, without her, I am sitting on the floor in our shared office going through all the folders I need to organize and file, because nothing goes with death and grief better than the mountains of paperwork that accompany it, as if any of it matters. Unfortunately, it matters a great deal, just not in any way that matters.

And I’ve broken everything out into categories and I’m just plodding along putting bits of paper in folders and labeling them, so I can put them back in the file drawer and be organized, because I guess that’s all there is left to do. And I find her handwritten notes for the painting project, repainting most of the rooms of the house when we moved in just shy of a year ago. She chose all of the colors, of course, and handled the contractors and saw it through. All the measurements and colors, contacts and phone numbers, in her handwriting I love so much.

And I turn the paper over to see what she wrote it on and it was on the back of a D&D character sheet for a character she played. Lists of spells. Notes at the bottom of the page indicating markers for “Concentration” and “Reaction”. Because once, that mattered.

And instantly I’m balled up on the floor wailing helplessly into my hands. Again. She’s gone. She’s gone.

This is my life. Every day. Every fucking day for 135 days. I cry for her every day, every day her absence fills me and permeates everything I do. Every day grief sweeps my legs out from under me. Every day I wish this could end and I could join her, wherever she is, wherever she went. Every day the impossibility of it all rips me out of the world I used to inhabit. The world I briefly belonged in, when we were together, when she was unbelievably mine and I was hers, for that breath we had between when we finally found our path together and when the cancer ripped her away.

It’s impossible, and it’s unbearable. And yet the train doesn’t stop. The world doesn’t stop. It should. It did, for me. 20 Sundays without her is already 20 too many. I don’t need a thousand more.