I write.  Always to the same recipient.  Never mailing, never sending, never adding postage.  Keeping my words locked up tightly, protected like a mother bear protects her cubs.  Never allowing anyone in, never letting the words out.

I look for you in the clouds, I write to him, in the air, in the songs on the radio.  I hope and I wish that he will speak to me somehow.  The clouds would part and a sunbeam would warm my face the way his smile used to, or the perfect lyrics-exactly what I need to hear-will resound loudly through the radio speakers.  Always searching.

Although I could never write a song that would be transmitted and reach him through airwaves, I could sing him a thousand verses of perfect prose.  I would string them together in a melody of honesty.  If my pen is the only way to reach him, then I will exhaust its ink, the ballpoint, the paper it glides across to write him my heart.

Words I never said on the Phone Call I did not answer, haunt the paper I write on.  Filling my thoughts, repeating over and over-Relentless and Loud-echoing in the empty hollows of a recovering heart.  But will it ever recover?  The answer is no.  It Will Not.  But I’m beginning to learn how to live without pieces.  The emptiness fills with the warmth of his voice whispering, You Can Do This.  And I find my peace in words and paper and pens and his memory.

I continue to leave fragments of paper under the mulch and flowers that surround where he rests.

Always the same words.  The words left unsaid that long to touch his ears.  I Love You.