9 Weeks

I realized this morning that Tony has been gone nine weeks already.  It’s funny because when I look back on when our relationship started back in 2000, we met in May of 2000, basically moved in together the middle of June about 3 weeks after we met, and got married six months after our first phone conversation after he found me online at love@aol (which morphed into what is now known as match.com).

I am sure our friends and family at the time were like “what the fuck are they doing?  they don’t even know each other yet!”  But we did.  From our first phone conversation I just felt . . . comfort.  I didn’t have to pretend to be anyone I wasn’t.  I wasn’t nervous talking to him, I wasn’t nervous about meeting him in person for the first after we talked on the phone a couple weeks.   The connection was just so strong, that we sat at a bar by my house at the time and talked for hours, then just leaned in and started kissing right then and there – we didn’t care where we were, or who was watching – I believe that a patron came over and threw us a couple bucks and told us to leave and get a room – ha!

Tony (aka Jeff!) sent me this email about three weeks after we met:

I was working at a law firm in Chicago and was switching jobs right before we got married and I literally printed out all our emails to each other back and forth from June 2000 until late September 2000.  Hannah had them spiral bound for me and had it at Tony’s memorial.

I was cleaning around my desk last night, getting stuff together for our my accountant appointment in a couple weeks, and I stumbled across a card that I never brought Tony:

Luckily Hannah was working and Jacob was at the gym, because I lost it.  I felt so bad that he never got to see that card, and when I put this on Instagram, I have Courtney to thank for me turning my tears to a smile – she said “Ah, he SO knew that though. #rockstarwife.”  And I do know that he knew I loved him to the core of his being.  I got him.  He was difficult at times to live with because in his opinion he was always right, he knew the right way of doing things, etc.”  I don’t want to sugar coat our marriage to let you all think that it was all rainbows and butterflies because it wasn’t.   But no matter what the argument was, we always knew that we had each other.  We knew at the end of the day if we had only each other, we would be perfectly happy.

It seems as if I miss him more now than when I immediately lost him because it seemed so surreal at the time.  Then it was the holidays, then Hannah and Jacob and the dogs moving in – I know I’ve described it as being on a merry-go-round and it kept getting faster and faster and the operator wasn’t looking at me waving my hands desperately to slow it all down.  Well finally the operator looked my way. And stopped the merry-go-round.  Except when it finally stopped, I was the only one on it and no matter where I looked in the the whole park, I couldn’t find my best friend.  Now it’s still.  His chair is empty in the living room.  His shirts are hanging in the closet just where I left them the last time I did laundry for him in early November. 

It’s just . . . not fair.   That I’ll never kiss those lips again.