I feel like an amputee. Like something essential and urgent has been removed from my person. This is no illness from which there is recovery. Instead this is a permanent removal of something vital to my health and well-being. It is something I will never get back. It is something I will never recover from. This is loss. This is desolation.

I spend my days in a stupor. Drifting from one meaningless conversation to the next. You are supposed to be of reduced importance to me but there is little further from the truth. You are my one. You are my everything. And, in so many ways, I feel that in your passing I am granted the freedom to speak freely of us. But even in the granting of that freedom I respect your wishes and I respect the people you surrounded yourself with and I keep my silence. It’s a painful silence. I want to shout of our love. I want to explain to all the world the connection you and I shared. But I cannot. Not yet. Not just now. Maybe in the days to come.

I love you more than life itself. Losing you is brutal. Losing you is pain. I get flashes of all that we were and I loved every minute.

I will tell the world our story. I will tell all the people of you. I will do my best to explain to them how wonderful you were and how much the world is reduced by your loss. I still quite cannot believe you have gone from this place and time. And, for the first time in my existence, I have prayed there is something beyond death. Because losing you is – there are no words. But the vague hope of seeing you again or feeling you next to me is of inestimable comfort. I only hope you know how much I loved you. I only hope you slipped into silent permanent slumber knowing how much you’d be missed.

Good bye my lover, good bye my friend. Until we meet again.