I was talking with a colleague. We don’t know each other well but well enough for not-surface but not-deep talk. Near the end of our exchange, my colleague looked at me and told me she was glad that I was “through the worst of it.” We hadn’t been speaking about Kurtis’s death but it is always present. I looked at her and said, “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
I wasn’t sure what I would say but I knew I wouldn’t say that.
She gestured with her hand, the way you wave away an insect, “I mean you’re not there anymore,” she said.
By there I understood she meant the first few months after he died. I wondered where she thought I was. After all, he is always dead.