Two months have passed, and Ava has finally begun something like normal life once more. She took a shower. She ate a very small meal—a few pieces of sliced deli turkey, a few slices of Havarti cheese, some jalapeño-stuffed olives, and a mug of black tea.

She was always a svelte woman, but now she is…worrisomely thin. Her ribs show, as do the bones in her wrists and forearms. Her cheeks are sunken. But she is upright, moving, and eating.

She still won’t speak, however.

I sat at the kitchen table with her and watched her eat, tried to engage her in conversation, but she completely ignored me.

I haven’t written a word in months. I fear I might never again.

I went into our bedroom to strip the bed so I could wash the bed sheets, and when I came back, Ava was gone. She’d taken her Mercedes and left.

I know where she went: to Henry’s grave. So I set the sheets to washing and went after her. I found her lying on the thick green grass over his grave.

God, that was difficult, seeing that headstone:

Henry Christopher Michael St. Pierre

Beloved son, gone too soon.

June 24, 2014—April 3, 2015

I sat beside her, traced the letters of his name on the marble. Touched, tentatively, Ava’s shoulder.

She jerked away. “Don’t touch me.”

“Ava, please, we need to—”

“Go away.”

“I’m hurting, too, you know.”

“Then go have another drink.”

“That’s not fair,” I told her. “He was my son. I loved him, and I lost him, too. You’re not going through this alone.”

“Yes, I am.” Her fingers dug into the grass, clawing as if to dig through the earth to cradle his tiny form beneath the soil.

“Well, you don’t have to. I love you. I need you, Ava. Let’s try to get through this together.”

She shook her head, but said nothing.

I stayed with her as she lay on the grave, hour by hour. The sun began to set, and I grasped her hand. “Ava, let’s go home. Please.”

She shook her head again. “You go. I’m staying here.”

So I sat with her hours more. The air grew cool, and she began to shiver beside me. I went to my Rover and retrieved the blanket I keep in the trunk, settled it around her shoulders. For the first time in the months since Henry passed away, her eyes met mine. Briefly, a fleeting touch of her eyes on mine; in her vivid blue gaze I saw a woman I did not know. Gone was the vibrancy, the life, the fierceness, the humor, the sweetness and compassion and the touch of arrogance, gone was the giver of zero fucks—her words, not mine—and gone was the woman who once convinced me to walk out of our philosophy class together so we could—as she put it—fuck like teenagers. Which was exactly what we had done. We had excused ourselves to go to the bathroom, her first and then me, and we fucked like crazy in the handicapped stall. Then we got into my restored and beloved 1988 Ford Bronco and drove to the beach where we fucked in the surf.

I would put it more eloquently, more poetically, but in truth, that afternoon, it was exactly that: raw, rough, and dirty fucking. There was no sweetness to it, no soft sighs in the candlelit darkness, no hands clasped and trembling as we found union in each other’s arms. We discovered all those things together, certainly, and many many more times over the years. But that afternoon…I don’t know. There was something in the air, I suppose. A fierce and wild drive to devour each other.

This evening, at 8:38pm, I looked into Ava’s eyes and did not see that woman.

(When I looked away, because I could take no more of her gaze, my gaze fell to my iWatch, and the digital readout told me the precise time when I knew my wife was gone.)

In her eyes, I saw only a vacant and haunted being, a withered and bitter emptiness. A woman I did not know. She was cold. So, so cold. I would say there was “distance” in her gaze, but that would not be a strong enough word; “distance” is the space between New York and Los Angeles. When we broke up our senior year, it was because she was afraid of falling in love with me as deeply as she felt herself doing, and panicked—a tale as old as time. She shut me out, and eventually walked away. But a month later, she knocked on my door and asked if we could talk. That day, in my apartment in Miami, there was distance in her eyes. She couldn’t stay away, but she was still afraid. It took months more for that ice to thaw, for the distance to close. That day, I saw distance—as if I was standing in Miami and she was physically present there with me, but emotionally, she may as well have been in Seattle.

When I met Ava’s gaze this evening, we were both sitting in a cemetery in Ft. Lauderdale, but emotionally and mentally Ava may as well have been sitting on Pluto, spinning in the farthest reaches of our solar system. That is not mere distance—that is something so much more that I do not know a word in any language to encompass it.

I got into my car and I drove home. I took the bottle of Johnny Walker and went out onto the beach and I buried my toes in the cool sand, and I drank myself into a stupor.

I am writing this at 4:24am, because I woke up on the beach, freezing. I vomited into the sand, and then went inside. Ava was asleep, and remained so as I took a shower and changed into sweatpants and my University of Miami hoodie. Instead of joining her in our bed—what had once been our bed, at least—I slept on the couch in my office. Or…tried to sleep. The couch is comfortable enough, which I know from experience, as I’ve slept there a few times after particularly nasty arguments. I couldn’t sleep. Not anymore.

I’m writing this journal, because it’s all I know how to do.

Perhaps if I can write here, I can manage to write fiction.

Perhaps not. I don’t know.

The only thing I do know for sure is that it feels as if I have died and am now trapped in purgatory.

How do I escape? Because escape I must, or…

Or what? I don’t know.

A common enough phrase to hear: I’m going crazy; I’m going to lose my mind.

But what does that look like when it really happens? What will I do when I can take no more?