What happens when you lose your best friend, the love of your life, your soul mate?  

It sucks…the life right out of your every day.  But you go on.  You have to.  

I have learned that life doesn’t stop and the truth is, people go through trials every day.  My trial was and is, my heart is still beating so it must mean my life is not finished.  There is something else, maybe a list of things I am supposed to do.  The only thing is…I don’t get to see that list.  It comes in the form of daily surprises, good and bad.  People I meet, randomly…and sometimes with great familiarity, who go through their own trials…called life.  

I guess the worst part is the silence.  The fact that I will never hear her voice again, audibly, in my presence.  I can hear things she used to say at infrequent intervals, but it’s not the same.  It never is.  

I still laugh at things she used to say, the joy she would get from simple things that I now see I took for granted.  How she would put her hand in the crease of my arm at church.  How she looked at me while walking back to our table at dinner.  The way she would walk behind me and put her hand on my shoulder and simply say, “I love you Joe”.  She would always say my name.  People miss how grand that gesture is.  I miss putting my head on her chest and falling asleep.  That.  

My laugh isn’t as untamed.  My tears are heavier.  My mind harkens to the past while living in the present…but I have found joy in a second life.  A next love.  Another chance to be great and to do great things.  I haven’t given up…because I can’t.  I still have things to do.  And when I wake up disoriented, wondering if it really happened, I come back to now.  This moment.  What is before me.  What is left to do.  The memories I am to make for those that have chosen to share their lives with me…and those that are still scarred from the same crash I lived through.  I know I owe it to them to move on.  To give them my best.  To love again.