Eight months. Eight months she’d been gone. Buried under a litany of nightmares and choked down tears. You spend enough time crying eventually you to hide it, let it out it bursts, little moments of weakness as the new status quo solidifies all around you. Mark’s been kind, letting me take half days as needed, a week off to take care of the funeral, and another when her sister tried to steal the house from underneath me. I was just starting to feel normal again… I found it hidden in the shadow of my monitor, a neon orange post-it note. “Hi sexybutt, thinking about you. Hope you smile when you read this!” The sweeping motion of her ‘l’s, the off kilter dot of the exclamation point. All that time and now I’m swimming in soupy concrete again. I don’t think I can do this…not again.