In my head we're seventeen, sitting next to each other in psychology class, and I have just told you that I think you're secretly a romantic. You look at me, eyes wide, as though I have told you that you are a bug or an axe murderer, and your furious denials do nothing to change my mind.

In my head we're twenty-three, and you are looking at me like no one has before or since, like I am a new species of creature, like you are starving. And then your hands are in my hair and I realize, for maybe the first time, the limitations of imagination. Real life is suddenly my favorite place.

In my head we're twenty-three, on the phone in the hours that are very late for me and very early for you, and you've admitted that I might have been right and that you may be a romantic. I laugh until I cry at the chagrin in your voice, as though everyone doesn't already know this. As though it's not one of your best qualities.

In my head we're twenty-four, on the phone, and I am blushing to my toes. I think you should come to visit me, and you agree enthusiastically but never do. I think we should go to France, and you agree enthusiastically and we never do. Ultimately I think this is what happened to the romantic part of us, all the time and the distance and that you always wanted to and never did. Somewhere in there I always thought we'd get another shot.

In my head we're twenty-seven, and we can't figure out where to go. We always find somewhere, and I get back to where I'm staying at dawn dazed about where the hours have gone, foggy-brained and smiling.

In my head we're twenty-eight and I would stop time here if I could. Our friends don't know what we're up to when we leave their house and later you're crying, which makes me cry, and I don't know if I've ever been as close to another human before. I shift my torso onto yours and try to beam all of my light into you.

In my head we're thirty-one and we've both had serious enough relationships at home that things have shifted between us, but everything that is really important is still the same and we sing along to the radio and laugh until we can't breathe anymore.

In my head we're thirty-four and I'm in town unexpectedly for another funeral. It's a hard one, and one of the only things I have to look forward to is making jokes that will bring out your big laugh. You're still one of my favorite people on the planet and making you laugh is the easiest thing but it's still so gratifying.

In my head we still have so many years left.

A side effect of all this living is how these grief events keep building up, one after the other, on and on and on until I am one myself. You could cut me open and see them there like tree rings, the lean times when everything but gray seemed in short supply. I'm still leaking sap all over the place right now, of course, but in not very long it will all be hardened over and sinking in, just one more thing in a long list of things. Nothing very good or very bad lasts for very long.

This one is the hardest one yet, a little bit I think because it has so much of my identity wrapped up in it. I've always believed in an alternate universe where we worked harder for what we had and made it into something big and crystalline and beautiful. I love the life that I built instead, of course, but I could have loved that one too.

I keep a sporadic list of things I want to track down, something I've read in a book that I want to focus on more closely later, books I want to read, people I want to research. Scattered among the list are the names of poets and looking back I'm never sure if what I wanted to make note of was their life or their work. Was it an action or a phrase that struck me? I never remember to record what I want and most of the time I never find my way back to the feeling that led me there. And yet now I keep hoping there's a secret there, a poem or a fact at the end of these breadcrumbs that will lift the weight on my heart for a moment. When really all that can do that is time.

There's comfort in that, in time, in the way that it just keeps on going. Tomorrow I will wake up, and the cat will bump my head with his, lick my nose, and chew on my phone, and it will be one week and one day since I heard the news. And then more after that, until one morning I wake up, and the cat bumps my head with his, and I forget to keep counting. 

I've been writing letters to you in my head for more years now than I haven't, more than half of my life with a place reserved just for you in a corner of my brain. I never felt too small for my skin when your voice was there and I'm not sure you knew that, and now that you're gone all I want is a time machine to let you know. You were precious and we all definitely took that for granted. I know that's what you're supposed to say whenever someone dies, but that doesn't make it less true.

I've been googling aneurysms for days, trying to find some combination of information that makes it seem real, that makes anything make sense. There's still time for this all to be a wacky misunderstanding.

The version of me that you saw was always better than the version of me that I see. From what everyone has been saying since you died, it seems that you made everyone feel that way. I always want to be the kind of person that makes other people feel like the center of something important but you actually did that, in ways that seemed effortless but probably weren't. I think we made more fun of you for your faults than appreciated you for all of your best qualities. I think we'll do it again, some more, to everyone else. That's one of the blind spots of being a human.

I loved that I knew you. I always will.