365

Time to be trite. You knew it was coming. But I kinda have to. All the words you read, and cried over, and responded to over the past 12 months...I can't just not write a big fat tearjerker on the one-year anniversary. This is an epic moment. If this makes you sad, I just want to apologize to your husbands in advance. Sorry husbands.

The Regirlfriend Was Here.

I know why they call the blinking vertical bar a "cursor" because I swear it's a curse on my ability to fricking TYPE. It just sits there blinking at me like "What are you waiting for, moron? You came and logged in to me, drafted me up, and now you're just going to sit there? Spit it out."

August 7 will always and forever be a cursed day to me. It might be sacred in a way, but when you get to live the year I just survived, you lose your ability to tell the difference. My friend Christi wrote today "It's almost time to say goodbye to the hardest year of your life." Meems wrote from the road: "I'm thinking about you. You have survived one full year in 2 hours." And for whatever weird reason...I'm sad about that. It feels like I lost something more now that The Year is up. I have no idea how to explain this.

I cry when I think about me, 365 days ago. Bebopping around in my car, totally oblivious to the fact that I had been common-law-widowed. I was sitting in Soup Kitchen with my coworkers, talking about the house we were buying. His plane was falling from the sky as I ate my lunch.

I think of that next day. August 8th. I had a hair appointment and then a family party. I went to the Barnes & Noble by my salon and picked up the Utah Bride & Groom magazine to thumb through while my hair was getting done. I found the ring I was to buy for Reboyfriend, and showed to everyone I could. I found a dress I thought he might like to marry me in. I could not wait for him to get home from Washington to go through the magazine with me. I knew he'd patiently play along. He was excited to start the planning.

I brought the magazine to the family party where all the girls sat around and analyzed which gown would be most "Kir." I showed off the awesome ring I'd buy him. While we planned my future, his body lay quiet and undiscovered in the mountains.

He must have watched me. He must have sat next to me, stood above me, swirled all around me as I read that magazine. He must have whispered in my ear when the image of his ring caught my eye and my gut filled with certainty that it should be his. He must have been the one pointing it out.

Soon after his death, on the week before he was to "officially" propose to me (according to his friends), my friends and I walked by a jewelry store that displayed a ring just like "his," but for women. They spotted it in the window and talked me into going inside and trying it on. They had my size. It was embedded with a white sapphire - a stone the sales lady said represented loyalty. The ring was a display of mountains, just like his was to be. The mountains were in the shape of the Tetons, which will always remind me of that day I randomly realized that I wanted to marry this guy. It all tied together too weirdly and too perfectly that I paid the price for the ring, probably more than I should have spent, but it was more than worth it.

I have worn it with the engraved band given to me by Argento, every day for the entire year. One for each of us.

Years ago, he was sprawled on my bed and I sat at the side of it talking to him. He said out of the blue, "You know, if I were deaf and blind and lost my sense of smell and taste and couldn't reach out to touch you, and I were lying here, I'd be able to tell you were next to me."

I was 19 and dumb and didn't really get it. He went on to explain that he clearly recognized my spirit or energy when it was around him. He could just sense me. And then I got it. Because I felt the same way about him. *I would be fast asleep, dreaming of cupcakes or garden gnomes, living cities away from him. And he drove into town in the middle of the night without telling me, and snuck into my room, and watched me sleep...and immediately, I was dreaming of him.

And now I wonder if that happened because he was right next to me, and I sensed him. This sense is piqued sometimes. And the part of me that has hope, believes this is because he's really nearby. The hopeful part of me tells the doubtful part of me to step off and get lost.

Think about it. Human beings can just burst out of other human beings after being tiny cells...all from a little bit of fluid swapping on a drunken night. Plants can just spring from the earth without any engineering from anyone. And perfectly on time. We all spin around this giant ball of fire every day without any human contribution. Why the hell couldn't this additional sense just be a part of nature? A part of science? A manifestation of physics? We can doubt it, and blame it on missing our other half. But it's just as likely that this shit just plain happens, and it's not all that complicated.

So I decided he is right here.

Dear Jed,

Thank you for the year of sweetness and miracles. Thank you for all the times you planted little whispers in my ears and the ears of those around me. We heard them.

I miss you. I miss you so desperately that sometimes *I don't see in color. At first I thought it was my contacts. Then I realized it's sadness. I'm a person, cut in half. And that does weird stuff to a girl's vision.

I miss you fast asleep, your limbs tangled around me like a koala around a tree. I miss the way you always addressed people by their names in the middle of your sentences. I miss your screwed up feet. I miss the way you held your cell phone. I miss my seat on the back of your bike, reaching around and into your facemask, feeding you a piece of Australian licorice at every mile marker. I miss you calling from the freeway just to say you could see my office building as you passed. I miss you lecturing me about not knowing how to use a tiedown. I miss you not knowing who Death Cab is. How you liked streaking. How your nickname for me was always "dream girl." How eerily appropriate that turned out to be. How you valued your freedom. How you would take off your shirt and make me wipe my nose on it when you'd make me cry. I miss your flaws, your shortcomings. I miss everything about you. Every little thing. And despite what we all hoped for in the beginning of this nightmare, a year's time has proven useless in fading any of that.

The last night we were together, I asked you what you'd do if I died. You flatly told me you'd follow me home. And to this moment, I can hear your words like you spoke them seconds ago: "If you died, I would never recover." That remark rings in my ears sometimes for hours as I go throughout my life, not recovering. Thank you for letting me know that I was your everything. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You were someone's everything too.

I'm wearing my big girl pants, Jed, even though I have lost everything. I want nothing more than to make you proud as you loom around me from time to time, probably shaking your head at me in the Crown Burger drive-thru, cheering me on from the stands of the ballgames, "frolicking" around me as I stand barefoot on your grave, and most likely watching me in the shower. I'll put money on the fact that you're saving me a seat next to you in heaven.

So I just want to check in, and write another one of my cheesy, weird, open letters to you for all to see, so they can know that you were here, and that even if you didn't spring generations of your progeny into the world, you left behind so much. Everyone deserves someone to leave behind in shambles. I guess that's my gift to you. To be that someone.

Always,

Dream Girl.

*These are stories I know I've told before. I haven't FULLY lost my mind. :)