The way you laugh

How are you doing?

Why does this question still matter so much to me? Every day you are on my mind and I wonder how you are.

No matter how much I fight; no matter how I throw myself into my work, I come home and this hollow sense pervades everything.

The emptiness is not a generalized thing. It is the absence of you. After all this time, what I wrote to you once is true still: life without you is clockwork. Not life. 

I remember how you laugh. I remember that we laughed all the time. It occurs to me that I don't laugh anymore and I get angry at myself because I can't seem to laugh.

It would have been better if I had never met you. I wish that I did not know you existed. How can I know you and love you and never hear your voice again? Never touch you? Never support you or lift you up when you're low? How can I not reach over and ask you how you are? How can I not touch your skin or feel my body pressed against yours? 

I still marvel that you were able to shut this off after a year of loving me and aching for me. How do you feel these days?

Is there a hole in the center of you as there is for me? Do you wonder how I am doing?

Are you able to laugh? 

Is it possible to take the good and leave the sorrow behind? Can I pretend that things did not end so awfully? Can I imagine that we did not love one another half as well as we did? Can I forget every promise you made? Will I forget the way you laugh?