I stare at the grave with Katrina’s headstone. She isn’t there of course-no body was ever found. Her real grave was the sea…But that’s too painful to mourn over more than once every few months, and it’s hard to get your privacy. It’s much easier to stand here, and look down at this empty grave, that’s supposed to stand in for her body.

I remember the funeral, standing here, looking down at her. Remember the friends that surrounded me, hers and mine alike, looking for a shoulder to cry on, someone to share the grief with. That was back when they would listen, back when their grief was as raw as mine, their pain something with a touchable quality, coming close to my own. It’s not like that anymore.

They shoved the pain away, locked the grief behind double doors, to be let out when they wanted it and nowhere else. They moved on with their lives, as is their rights, and left me and Katherine behind. Because I can’t move forward.

I don’t have it in me to pretend that nothing’s happened, and that everything will be okay. Because it won’t be okay, it won’t be alright-the woman I love is dead, and there is no bringing her back. So I stay behind, as they move forward, and stop wanting to listen to my tears. I stay by this fake grave, just as my heart stays by her real one, where it has rested since the day she died. I let them keep their pet grieves, so that my real one can go around unchained without tearing their worlds apart.

Katherine’s funeral was surrounded by crying people, filled with grief they could barely manage, and a very few who could not hold it at all. Mine will be different.

There will be people at my funeral, I am certain; former friends who talk of how sad they are that I passed. But there will be no real grief. They used up their tears long ago, and grieved for me while I still lived; my death will do nothing but make my state official.

There will be no tears at my funeral.