April 9, 2003

My entire life has been eclipsed by one moment, by a single memory—a drop in the ocean compared to what I have known and felt. But when that drop plunged into my life, it was suddenly as if the other countless drops dried up. There was no trace of anything else. It seemed as though nothing else had ever existed. What did I care, anyway? You were gone, and nothing else mattered.

Those other drops are coming back now. I wake up every morning and feel them swishing around in my head, the little puddles of my memories. I can’t examine them too closely, because everything is inextricably linked to you. When I think about you for too long, it just takes that much longer for my ocean to come back.

I think everyone else thinks I’m fine. I’m a good pretender, better than anybody gives me credit for. I always smile at the right times, and laugh at the jokes, and make polite conversation. I feign interest in the lives of my friends, but there are really only a few for whom the interest is real.

I know you didn’t mean to leave, so I forgive you. After all, you didn’t even really know me. How could I hold you responsible for the death you didn’t cause, and didn’t intend to hurt me with? In the month since you left, I’ve mourned you every second of every day. Thirty days. 720 hours. 43200 minutes. 2592000 seconds, and there isn’t one of them that I haven’t--

I woke, gasping, from the dream. It was the same dream, night after interminable night. I had no idea what it was about, but it needed to stop. That was my handwriting that I was reading in the journal. At the top of the page was always the same date: April 9, 2003. But what had the entry said at the end...? I struggled to recall. Maybe if I were to think about something else

I had never seen that far into the entry before. I wonder if—Ah! And there it was. At the end of the entry, I had written that 30 days earlier, thirty days before, 30 days before April 9, someone had left me.

I experienced a sinking feeling, realizing that 30 days before April 9 was today, March 10. As I realized that, I knew immediately that something would happen today, something so disastrous that I would write that page in my journal. I didn’t know who would be leaving me, but I had a pretty good hunch.