I am not sure anymore that anything I am doing is right. Oddly, this hasn’t translated into a lack of self-confidence, because I forge my own path with what is happening between O. and I and very rarely spend any amount of time second-guessing my instincts — like I did when you died.

My whole being was tied into a question mark when you died. Every day greeting me with a new question: Does he still love me? Has he found someone else where he is? Does he know how much I love him? Could I have prevented his death? Nothing was sound anymore; my reality was experience a perpetual earthquake. Even when I thought I was standing on solid ground, something or someone would come along and remind me that everything was in flux, shifting and rearranging at will.

Perhaps that is the difference I am sensing. The divorce isn’t destabilizing me in the same way your death did. I don’t feel as unsteady, don’t have the constant questions poking the back of my mind, insistent in their perseverance.

Maybe, too, that’s why letting you go has been so difficult. I feel almost like I can’t let you go before I know all the answers to all of these questions. Even the knowledge of the impossibility of ever having answers doesn’t stop me, like a difficult puzzle I stare it instead of setting aside.

And, at the end of the day, there is a real fear inside me that somehow equates letting you go, giving us both our freedom, with no longer loving or being loved. Why can’t I acknowledge the beauty of having loved you without shackling myself to my memories?

I spin round and round and still wonder, tossing questions to the ether, hoping for a response. Waiting for release, relief.