Is there a logic to sadness? How and why it gets hold of your throat and strangles you on a cool and grey morning or in the middle of a sunny afternoon? Is there a cure for missing someone in places that were never shared? How do you forget moments of intensity, that cut straight through the heart?

The rain will always remind me of you. Me and you sheltering under the umbrella of a picnic table, you averting your eyes and choking slightly as I silently wept. I still cry at the memory. We never said goodbye, not in words, but my tears have always known that I have to let you go. On that rainy day, I remember we shared little sweet tomatoes, and I promised to get you a package next week, when you returned from mission, sometime in the future. I never got to do it. Yesterday, I asked for two packages, and I am already choked up and saddened because I won’t be sharing them with you. I think I will have to let go of the sweet baby tomatoes too.

I have abandoned our usual lunchtime, went back to eating at noon. I eat chicken and meat again at lunch to spite your vegetarian gods. I never have coffee at the usual place, nor the usual time. I am going quickly through all the books you told me you liked, as if I am putting everything on a funeral pyre, to burn. I am incinerating pieces of my heart in the process.

If I had read the English Patient before I met you, I would have classified it as pretentious literary drivel. Who on earth would write a sentence like “penis like a sleeping seahorse” ?.  I still hate that sentence, but I mostly get the book. I relate to the raw pain of the broken characters that populated the story.  I also ask myself half a dozen times a day “How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled”.  In your absence you are no less present in my heart, like one of Kip’s sleeping bombs waiting to explode. I wish I had the talent to defuse your memory. So that I can stop the sudden explosion of sadness, the choking hold that grabs my throat at odd times. Most days I am fine, I can enjoy the sunshine, coffee, food, and my son’s company. But I do not have patience with new people. I prefer to be alone. At times I take a forest path, I sit at the water watching a pair of crowned crane flanked by a school of Ibis. I am outwardly calm and content but I never know when I will be hit by that overwhelming tide of sadness. Like today.

I let go completely on the hope that each new day will be a little easier. That my heart will heal eventually.  But the road is long, especially knowing what I found and what I was honor-bound to give up.  I was disassembled by loving you, and I fear that I will always be broken, and never feel whole again, without you.