Another year, another milestone. I take stock, survey my self for signs of life, of death, of other, of the After.

My emotions have a strange taste, metallic and unknown. My body is a marionette doll with loose strings. I could sleep for a thousand years yet force myself to stay awake. I'm lulled to slumber only by tales of wizards and trolls and girls with silver shoes from my love's honey voice soft as lavender- sweet sandalwood-man dreams are summoned.

Grief is hard work. Tiring. Endless. And that knowledge is a comfort when little else in the world can soothe the blistering pains and festered wounds that lie but a layer of skin below. So I let the stories wash over, a calamine salve on red raw me. How else to unleash the worlds of hurt that live inside with the no-longers and would-have-beens unable to exist with him gone. The universe is full of possibilities, but not for him. Impossible adheres to my ribcage and Gone locks my kneecaps and Never stops the heart I demand keeps beating so the Left Behind of him might live on, if only to be heard in a breaking heart once in a while.