I’m okay now.
At least more okay than I was.
I don’t cry every day anymore, so that must be progress.
There was a time when your name could undo me before the sun had fully risen.
A time when every phone notification made my heart stumble, when every unfamiliar vehicle turning into the driveway made me look twice.
That doesn’t happen as often now.
Not because I miss you less.
But because a heart can only break in the exact same place so many times before it learns how to carry the crack.
It has been so long since I’ve heard your voice.
So long since I’ve felt your hug, seen your smile, or smelled the sunshine in your hair and the scent of an honest day’s work lingering in your clothes. Time has not erased those things.
If anything, it has sharpened them.
Your children are all another year older now.
So am I. So is everyone and everything.
Birthdays have come and gone. Holidays have arrived and passed. Seasons have changed without asking anyone’s permission.
Time kept moving.
I hated that at first.
It felt disloyal to laugh.
Disloyal to enjoy a meal.
Disloyal to have a good day when there was still so many empty places at the table.
But life is stubborn.
It insists on continuing.
I see your wife from time to time on social media. Her smile is still the one I remember from porch conversations and crowded kitchens. I see traces of the life that once intertwined so naturally with ours, and I wonder if she ever thinks about those days too.
The children are growing.
The family is changing.
The world keeps turning.
And I am learning that standing still will not bring you back into my life —our life.
I spent a long time living inside that stormy summer evening, replaying words, replaying mistakes, replaying every crossroads where things might have gone differently.
I searched for answers in places where answers no longer lived.
Grief is a hungry thing.
If you feed it, it begins to consume everything in its path and everyone around it.
I can’t let that happen.
Not anymore.
There are people here who still need me.
Still need my strength.
Still need my presence.
Still need me to be ok.
I need them to be okay. I need you to be okay.
So I will not lock myself away in regret and what if and so much sorrow.
I will not ask the rest of the family to live in the shadow of my heartbreak.
I will love.
I will celebrate birthdays.
I will make memories.
I will laugh when something is funny. I will heal. I will forgive.
And so will you.
I will cry when I must.
And when thoughts of you come—and they always do—I will let them sit beside me for a while.
Not as an open wound.
Not as a punishment.
But as happiness … as love. And I’ll smile.
Because despite everything, that is what this has always been.
Love with nowhere to go.
Love that cannot call.
Love that cannot visit.
Love that cannot hold its grandchildren.
Love that waits.
And though I no longer stand at the window or watching the road every day, some part of my heart still leaves the porch light on.
Just in case.
The Real Janna Hill in 