You are only a stone now, cold in the winter and burning in the summer heat. But this is the closest I can come to being next to you. So I will sit here, next to your stone, with what used to be you under me, quietly feeding the grass.

They say that time is the great healer, but it has been years. The space I made for you is still there, empty since you left. Irrationality has made me wait, although I'm not sure what it is I'm waiting for. A great miracle? Death?

A great miracle is out of reach. Death is there, just beyond my grasp. Death is with you, separating us along this mortal coil.

The space where you used to be is so empty where it used to be so full. I trace the lines of the space and try to rejoice in the sunlight. And still, it is not second nature to me to know that you're not there. I still expect you when I come home. I still reach for you in my sleep. I still turn around, annoyed, that you don't come running to help open the lid of a testy jar. I still wait for you to come home.

I still expect you to be breathing beside me, offering up your loud, irritating commentary on this life you left me behind in. It is the same commentary that drew me in the first place, that made me argue back, that challenged both of us to challenge ourselves.

Am I pathetic? To be talking to empty air? Have I run off the cliff of sanity and fallen into the gulf of the Mad? To still make a list of all the things we should do one day, of all the things I need to tell you about my day...to still plan as if there is a lifetime ahead of us both?

Am I insane to construct retroactive fantasies of how it could have gone if only you hadn't gone? To imagine the morning after the night you stopped breathing, with your arms wrapped around me as always - as if the morning had come and we named our children like we'd planned? Who they would be if they had met you, known you, laughed with you. If the excitement we'd felt hadn't left me and turned into dread.

So many ifs. Because I still expect you. Time is nothing. Time is a circular wind, funneling down and destroying, doubling back on itself and putting us back into pivotal moments - after the fact.

What was the hour you left? What was the minute? Did you notice? Did you fight it? Or did you go gently?

I would rage, rage against it. And still, I expect you: even in the dying of the light. Even in the shades of grey, even in the bright sun. Always. I still expect you.