1 month

It has been thirty days since the rug was pulled out from under me, and I am still standing in the rubble of it, trying to figure out how to describe what this has felt like.

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I miss you. I miss you in the morning when I wake up and look at you first thing and tell you that I love you. I miss you in the quiet stretches of the afternoon when something funny happens and you are the first person I want to tell. I miss you at night the most, when the noise of the day dies down and there is nothing left to distract me from the fact that you are actually gone.

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I still carry so much love for you, and I probably will for a very long time. It has not dimmed at all, it sits with me like something warm and aching at the same time, a feeling I do not know what to do with because the person it belongs to is no longer here to receive it. Love without a place to go is a strange and heavy thing. But I carry it anyway.

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Every day has hurt. Not in a dramatic, falling-apart kind of way. More like a low and constant ache that follows me from room to room. Some mornings I wake up and there is a split second before I remember, and then I remember, and the day begins with that weight already on my chest. I have learned to keep moving through it. I do not always do it gracefully, but I manage do it.

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I know that what we had was very real. I know that you loved me in the ways you knew how to, and I know I loved you with everything I had. The ending of something does not erase what it was. That is something I am holding onto right now, maybe the only thing that makes the grief feel like it was worth it.

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I think about you building something new and I genuinely want it to be good for you, even when that thought cuts a little. That is what love does, I think. It stays generous even when it really hurts the most.

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I do not know what I am supposed to feel at one month. I do not know if there is a right way to do this. I just know that I loved you, that I love you still in some quieter and more honest version of that word, and that every single day since you left has reminded me how much space you took up in my life. That space is still yours, even now.

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One month. I am still here. Still carrying it. Still learning what it means to keep going when someone you love becomes a chapter instead of the story.

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I hope you are okay.

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I hope I am too, eventually.

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I love you and I miss you more than anything.