I don't want to go on without her.

Sometimes I roll over and try to touch her in my sleep, and then I wake up to remember that she’s gone, and I get this horrible, empty feeling in my stomach. When I used to not be able to sleep, I would watch her chest rise and fall beside me and think about how I loved her more than anything in the world. Now when I can’t sleep, I close my eyes so I don’t have to see the empty, unmade bed beside me. She's over there, but everything about her is still over here. She's gone, but she's everywhere.

She’s in the Cheerios that we used to share in the morning. She always put too much milk in her cereal. I never understood why, because it makes it soggy. Sometimes I put too much milk in my cereal now, just to have a little bit more of her with me.

She’s in the sea foam green walls of the bedroom and the eggshell white curtains that she picked to match. She's in the comforter that I had to exchange because the one I picked the first time didn't match the sea foam or the eggshell. She’s in the eerie yellow streetlight coming through the window. She’s in the side of the bed that I will never make again.

She’s in the nightmares that she used to wake me up from. She’s in the car next to me in the traffic on the beltway, in the smell of cigarettes on the metro that she used to complain about, in the radio that is still pre-set to her favorite stations. She’s in the purple shampoo bottles that I still haven’t moved from the shower, and in the CDs she collected into an obnoxious pile on the living room floor that I couldn’t bear to move and still can’t.

She’s in the Cheerios that I still eat every morning even though they make me feel sick. She’s everywhere but here with me.

And I loved her. I loved her very much, and I don't want to live in a world that she doesn't live in. I don't want to live in a world that has sea foam green and soggy Cheerios and rush hour traffic but doesn't have her.

I don't want to go on without her.