Looking for you: Over my Shoulder

The night is pregnant with possibilities of betrayal.
I hold my breath, waiting for the anvil to drop.
There is a reason that I stopped drinking during this week. Yet here I sit, on my computer, drinking.
With each swallow, I push it farther down.
You.
You that I miss, that I love, that I still talk to when no one else is looking.

I opened my bedroom window. The drink was making me warm. On the breeze floated the smell of your hair the last time I saw you alive.
In the music that is so opposite to what it is you always listened to I hear our conversations and laughter. I hear the plans you told me about and the dreams you dreamt for your kids.

How has it been this long when I saw you smiling just yesterday? How do I feel hundreds of years older this one week then any other day of the year?
Little did I know, how long this would go on, how deep this has cut me, nearly in half.
I have no capacity to process this still.
Most days I feel like it's just an intricate balance of keeping the appropriate emotion at the surface until I can be alone with my memories of you.

I don't want to sanctify you. I want to remember you as a reality, not some put together idealized version of who you were. But this week. This one week, I let myself dream and think of you. This week I look at you more closely and directly then I can let myself any other time of the year. This week I let myself imagine what it would be like if...
This is the week that I realize there's a very good reason that I confine that imagination to a week. The grief would damn near kill me otherwise.