It’s been three weeks since the love of my life died. Three entire weeks of grief. You begin to think this will go on forever, and it probably will, but even over these three short weeks, the grief has changed.

The hole in my heart is no longer a sucking chest wound, but more of a dull, throbbing, occasional pain like a toothache that’s not quite at catastrophic failure yet. It’s there and you rarely forget it, but it’s not the focus of your universe anymore. I can sometimes go a few hours before my brain matter-of-factly reminds me, “he’s gone.”

“He’s gone,” and with those words whispered in my brain, comes a dull, throbbing pain in the center of my chest.

I haven’t cried. I think I’ve cried all the tears I’ve been allotted this year already and it’s only April. I haven’t even had the random tears rolling down my face this week. They’ve all just dried up and gone away.

Week three has brought memories. I hear his voice in my head and I wonder how long it will be before I forget what his voice sounds like. I’ll never forget the feel of his chest hair or the depths of his blue eyes, but I will forget what his voice sounds like.

I haven’t listened to any of the voice mails I still have on my phone from him. I’m still in avoidance. I created a new playlist of music that has no relation to him and I’ve been listening to new music, too. Brand new artists I’ve never heard before with no connection to him.

I’ve been watching Korean revenge flicks, yakuza film and wuxia. I can’t watch anything that has any emotional content; nothing with interpersonal drama. Although, even in the safest of genres, there are scenes where a man’s wife dies before his eyes and so on. You can’t avoid interpersonal drama entirely. It exists everywhere. The South Koreans are making some fine fucking films, I tell you what. If I had to choose only one country’s films to watch for the next year, it would be Korea.

Still, the memories come. I hear his voice in my head from the last time he visited saying, “I love you and I always will.” I hear him ironically saying, “If you commit suicide, I’ll kill you,” from when I went through a really bad depressive spell he helped get me out of a few years ago. I hear him saying, “You’re fierce, you’re beautiful and I love you,” which he’d say while holding my face in his hands when I was doubting myself, which I always seem to do.

I believe that he’d be pissed off to know that he’s dead. He’d worry about me. He wouldn’t have died on purpose, because he’d worry about how I’d handle it. And I hear him saying about me the words he said to me about my best friend when I was at my worst, “If you die, she’ll never recover.”

I wonder how I’m supposed to get through this without him when he’s the person I went to when things like this happened. My best friend has been great. She’s worried about me, and rightfully so, but our relationship is not the same as the relationship I had with Male. She doesn’t put her hand on my heart, look me in the eye and tell me, “Everything will be alright,” like Male did. She doesn’t curl me up in her arms and smother me. It’s not the same and it never will be again.

And I wonder what I’m supposed to do now. Male and I were going to move out of state together when he was done with law school in a year. We had plans. For the past year or so, I’ve been taking inventory in my head of things I need to move and things I can get rid of. I look at the ugly lamp on my desk he gave to me for safekeeping and realize that it will never return to its owner.

I had gotten used to thinking long-term, but now, I have no plans. There is no such thing as long-term. There is only today and today hurts like hell.