Yeah, so I skipped a week. Sue me. My shrinky dink wants me to write every damn day and I can’t even manage every week.

It’s been 8 weeks since the love of my life died. Dead. Gone. Forever. I’ll never get another hug.

Those sentences there are my personal test of my pain threshold. Writing that didn’t make me cry this time, but I did have a mild stab in the chest.

The searing pain of weeks 1-3 have been replaced by a mild soreness in the chest region. I’m still amazed that grief physically hurts. There are physical symptoms to losing your life partner. Who knew? I certainly didn’t until it happened to me.

Not a day goes by when I don’t think of him. My brain still factually reminds me every day that he’s gone. I’ll be brushing my teeth, doing laundry, or worst of all, waking up first thing in the morning, and my brain will chime in with, “He’s gone.” Yeah, thanks, brain, because I almost forgot for a millisecond that the person I love the most in the world is gone forever. Thanks for reminding me.

I am alone. There is no “us;” there is only “me.” In some ways, it’s kind of nice being single with an excuse. I don’t have to hear people nag me about being single. “When are you going to get married?” “Never. He’s dead.” I wonder how long it will take for people to start bothering me about singledom. I figure I’ve got at least a year before anyone tells me I need to “get out there again.”

The reminders are becoming less painful. There are still a few songs that I can’t hear at all and skip the second they come on, but for the most part, I can listen to about 90% of my music again, even music he gave me or is in some way associated with him.

I’m still avoiding Facebook, because fuck Facebook. From what I hear, the posting of pictures, stories, etc., is still going on, and some jackass even posted pictures taken at his memorial. Who does that? A memorial is not a damn party. I just don’t think it’s appropriate to take pictures of people grieving and then post them on Facebook. I don’t even know if I’m in any of them, because I don’t want to see that. I don’t really care.

I’m not numb anymore. I’m something else. I’m not sure what. My shrink called my mental state “brittle,” which is as appropriate a term as any. The dictionary defines brittle this way:

hard but liable to break or shatter easily

That’s about right. Hell, that could describe me in general. And my best friend sent me this:

And this is why she’s my best friend.

The only person I want to spend any time with is imaginary: “One foot in front of the other, primate.” And so it goes; one step at a time.