It will hurt less in time, that’s what they always tell you

as if they knew, and perhaps they do, but their pain is not my pain,

can never be, for I own it, not you.

It is true that with the passage of time, the gashing wound in my heart

has cauterized, but the scar remains, the scar left by your absence.

For several years after you died, I went to your grave

and knelt by the gray, stone-chiseled marble bearing your name

and I told you that I would never forget you. As if you could hear.

And then, after some years had passed, I still lit the candles

but I no longer visited your grave. It seemed a futile gesture, for you were not there.

under the cold marble by the cypress tree, in the gray ashes in the urn below the ground.

I used to love looking at the passing clouds, imagining that one of them was you,

you who loved the clouds and knew them by name.

“What does it feel like to lose a mate?” someone asked me once.

“Like losing a limb,” I said, “a part of me that will never be whole, incomplete.

And he nodded. As if he knew.

— Eva Edmands lives in Lawrence.