08/28/2026
Eight months is a strange number.
Long enough for people to assume the sharpest edges should have dulled.
Long enough for the world to stop treating your absence like something new.
But not long enough for me to understand how a person can be here, woven into your life, and then suddenly exist only in memory.
Eight months ago, I did not know ordinary things could become sacred.
A voice.
A shirt.
A ring.
A ride.
A song.
A name lighting up on a phone.
I did not know absence could have texture.
That silence could feel physical.
That missing someone could live in your body like an extra organ no doctor could ever remove.
I know now.
I know what it is to live in a world that still contains the places you stood, the roads you rode, the plans you made, but no longer contains you.
You do not simply lose a person.
You lose the version of yourself that existed beside them.
You lose future conversations.
Future photographs.
Future arguments.
Future stupid jokes.
Future mornings.
Future memories we were supposed to make.
You lose things that never had the chance to happen.
Somehow, you grieve those too.
Kerry, eight months later, I still catch myself saving things for you.
A story.
Something funny.
Something I know you would have had an opinion about.
For a second, my mind forgets.
Then reality remembers for me.
That half a second might be one of the cruelest things grief does.
Eight months has taught me this:
You are not becoming smaller in my life because more days separate me from the last one we shared.
You are becoming part of the architecture of who I am.
Built into me.
Permanent.
I do not need to pretend I am “healing” in some neat, inspirational way.
I am learning.
Adapting.
Breaking.
Rebuilding.
Laughing.
Crying.
Living.
Missing you.
Today makes eight months.
I do not have a lesson to attach to that.
I just have the truth.
You were here.
You mattered.
You were loved
You are still loved.
No amount of time will make you feel like something that happened long ago.
You are still part of my present.
Just in a way I never wanted.
Eight months, Kerry.
And I still love you in the present tense.
One day closer
