I keep trying to let this go without words.

It doesn’t work for me.

The last couple of weeks have sucked. I wonder if they always will? Every day I kept thinking of what was happening two years ago. The arrangements. The plane flight. The car ride. The beach. And then the birthday.

Twenty-five years ago, I didn’t celebrate my birthday.

I thought then that it would be the worst birthday of my life. Yeah, so far, I was right. But two years ago, my birthday came a week after Michelle’s memorial service. I don’t know why her death sent me into such a death-spiral of grief and sorrow. Maybe it was just because it was the fourth death in six months. Maybe if she’d died at some safer time in my life it wouldn’t have hit me so hard. But no. No.

She was–is–the only person that I’ve ever thought truly understood me, down to my core, and loved me for who I am. Lots of people love me for who they think I am. I’ve got plenty of love. (Of course I do–I’m crazily co-dependent, tell me you need something and I will do my best to give it to you, no questions asked. It’s the recipe for love.) But Michelle–she saw all of me. And she didn’t ask for anything. She just loved.

Yesterday was her birthday. She would have been 47. She died when she was 44. Her birthday is 4/4. My birthday is 4/7. I want to believe that it will be a magical year–that my birthday year, my 47th, will be special, crazily wonderful in some way I can’t imagine. On your birthday year, all your wishes should come true. But I sort of think that Michelle would have wished for the cancer to go away, once and for all. And instead she died. And me… well, for the past couple of weeks I have just been captured by the sad. I know that there are worse things in life. Hell, all those people in Syria are pretty damn miserable right now. This week, a former colleague of mine got to tell his five-year-old daughter that the bad rocks in her head were back and she was probably going to die. I have nothing, NOTHING, to be sad about.

But I still miss Michelle. I still wish I could talk to her. I still want her to be here, somewhere. I still want to believe that I could reach out and find her somewhere. I’m still… just so sad.