Different

It had really not been a different day the day you died. It had started out like any other day. You shuffled next to me in bed and I felt your arm slither across and around my waist, rolling me over to face you. You kissed me (despite my morning breath) and mumbled, “good morning,” with your eyes still closed. I stretched, still in your arms, and you nuzzled up to me. I carefully peeled your arms off me and kissed you on the forehead before making my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth and tie my hair.

Knowing you wouldn’t leave the bed so soon, I began making coffee and setting the table for breakfast. I picked out some strawberries (for me) and an apple (for you), and poured myself a bowl of cereal. I sat down and began reading the cereal box. A few minutes later, you appeared in the kitchen, dishevelled hair and shirtless, yawning and beautiful.

Those were always the moments when I realized why I fell in love with you.

You sat down wordlessly and stared at me. I put the cereal box between us and stared back, peeking over it. You did not move.

“You are absolutely beautiful.”

We had been together for 8 years, and I still could not stop myself from blushing or understand how loving and caring and amazing you were. Remarks like that always unsettled me.

You poured yourself some coffee and took the cereal box from my hands and began reading it.

That day – a Sunday, I recall – went the way all Sundays usually did. We had breakfast and lay lazily in bed until 3 PM, kissing, talking, reading, laughing, touching, panting, moaning, groaning.

At 3, the phone rang for you. You were needed at work. We showered together, and you left me at about 4.

You never came back.

In the midst of my terror and despair, I feared you had been in a car crash.

The truth is worse and more painful.

Man’s ability to hurt each other without remorse or shame will never cease to amaze me.

When leaving the office, you found yourself in the middle of a fight between two armed men. God knows why they decided to include you in their fight; god knows why they decided to hurt you.

Maybe you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I suppose it doesn’t matter why they did it. It only matters that they did it. That they hurt you. That they didn’t stop to think for a moment that you had a family, a lover, friends, a life.

Stabbed three times in the stomach and once in the chest, puncturing your lung.

I didn’t ask because I couldn’t bear to know for sure, but I imagine you felt intense pain that worsened by the second.

And to this day, it kills me. It kills me everyday to wake up on my own, without a kiss, without your arm around me. To eat, shower, read, sleep alone.

The house is empty.

Devoid.

Aching.

And sometimes, when I wake up, I forget for a second that you are dead. For a second, I like to pretend you decided to let me sleep in and I’ll find you in the bathroom or the kitchen.

And then it hits me.

We had lived together for eight years. We had created a routine, so dynamic and fitting to us both. We both knew we were destined to grow old together.

It’s been a year and three days now.

While all our friends understand my pain, they say I should go out. Meet new people.

Move on.

And as much as I cannot bear the pain I feel everyday and as much as I know in my bones moving on would relieve me of this pain, I don’t want to.

I don’t want to move on.

I don’t want to be in any arms that are not yours.

I don’t want to kiss anybody else.

I don’t want to create a new relationship, a new home.

I want you.

But you are gone. And there is no way to lure you back.

I can’t touch you. Ever again.

I can’t hear your voice or your laughter or feel your stubble rough against my skin in the morning or feel the smell of you, morning, noon and night.

I’ll never, ever, have you back.

I miss you so much.

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Written in a bathtub in Argentina, after a visit to Cementerio de la Recoleta, after a witnessing a very touching scene - an old man taking flowers to his wife (but that's what I like to think. Maybe it was somebody else).

I've been writing more consistently now, but I've been picking out with more care and caution the stories I want to post, which is why I've been so absent lately...