Ten Years Gone*

10 years today. I've written so much about Amir over the years, yet today I can't find the right words. Marking 10 years is no different from 9 years or 11 years or 50 years - my heart aches as profoundly today as it did from the first day we were forced to live without you and it will never not ache. Grief does NOT get easier. My brain may have become accustomed to not seeing you, not talking to you, not making plans with you, not sharing our day-to-day lives. But your absence never gets easier to accept. Days go by with no tears, but they are always just underneath the surface, waiting for the simplest trigger to coax them out. (Usually a random song playing in a supermarket, or a '70s-model car rolling by, or the merest mention of Sesame Street or Star Wars, or the enlightenment gained from a music podcast or documentary that I'd give my left arm to be able to share with you.)

Listening this morning to music you loved that recalls so many memories of how we'd listen together, on the floor in front of the stereo, in the car on road trips, in the backyard, at parties with childhood friends and cousins. Recalling you dancing around the living room as a kid, mistaking lyrics, calling me into the den in MTV's infancy, sitting rapt on the couch as we embraced the exciting new frontier of music videos and waited impatiently for our favorites to air.

If I could lock away all my memories of you in a safe place that I would always be able to access without any fear of them fading as time moves forward, I would pay any money to do so.

I've aged 10 years without you here, visible and mental signs of which have been accelerated by your loss and the giant hole it has left in our lives. And yet somehow we go on without you and will continue to do so, diminished at times but also grateful and emboldened to make the most of this life.

*one of many Led Zeppelin songs Amir loved (as do I)