It is the day after Christmas and I am driving with my windows down. The temperature outside is 71 degrees and the painted swirling of purple and pink in the sky is nostalgically reminiscent of a scene from Hercules, a movie I watched over and over again as a little girl in the playroom with the blue carpet at our first house in Tennessee. The song on the radio is a slow beating tune that I've compared in the past to the feeling of summer breezes, one called "David Bowie, I love You (Since I Was Six)" as performed by Jessica Lea Mayfield. The person in my passenger seat is the love of my life, the person who took my hand on a beach this summer and asked me to marry him; he is smiling to himself and takes my hand again. The picture sitting atop my CD pile under the dashboard is, as always, secure in its place and showing the smile of my beautiful best friend. This day is the second ever Day After Christmas that I will look at her picture only. Today is the second Day After Christmas that I have ever lived on earth without her and her second ever Day after Christmas not on earth.

The immediate and constant truths of this world find ways to mesh together on every normal day. Today is beautiful outside, today she is still not here. There becomes a new normal in the world where somebody is missing. The muscle memory builds even when you think you'll never learn ways to swim up. There becomes an aching happiness in the moments you look over the hillside and know they're not here, but everywhere.

But as this year ends, this long and grueling year for so many people, I can't help but choke on the word another. This is the first time I will say another year has passed since we said goodbye. I think of her often, always, still. But the second year has brought about fears I wasn't prepared for. What did her voice sound like... What songs got stuck in her head all the time... What pissed her off, what was her favorite kind of sandwich, what color was her hair exactly... Am I forgetting...

I think of everything that has happened this year and I am both grateful and sorry for every joy I've had to share with her in this new way, telling her out loud in the car or writing in a journal or just thinking it to her somehow. For each good thing, I have had so many moments where the pain does not reign overlord in my life, and for that I know she has to be happy because I know that is what I would want for her more than anything... but does this mean I am forgetting? In another year without her here, I have battled the shame of balance between learning to forget myself and fearing forgetting her. My best friend.

Life goes on after someone dies. Even the most important, precious someone in your life that you couldn't image the world to spin without. It does. It has to. This year I've lived. I took a bunch of really hard classes and didn't fail, I even withdrew from one because it was too hard and I felt ok about that decision. I left my stupid job that I hated and finally got a new one. I am performing again, I started writing again. There is genuine passion for my art again, a love I truly believed might have died with her. Our other best friend has fallen in love with one of the most beautiful girls I have ever known. She has the same middle name as her. I am getting married. I am getting married next year! And I went to a million music festivals this summer with the love of my life. We went to the Bahamas for four days and got drunk in a pool that had a bar in it. I bought a bike at a yard sale. All the little things. And the big things. Every single thing has layers to it in a way it never did before. And she's under it all. Planning my wedding without her is indescribable. Standing at the Cross up on Sewanee Mountain looking over the town with our other best friend and knowing in the silence that we both miss her more than words, is a moment I think will echo in the universe forever. Looking at her picture and trying to conjure her voice is a terrifying pain I will never stop feeling. But she is there in all of it and I would trade that for nothing. There is not another person to have ever existed that I could imagine this kind of love from to sustain me through it all. It carries the pain, it carries the hope, it carries the memories.

Another year. I should hope to live so many more, and for every one of them I will have these days, and I know it. I will have the days to cringe at the thought that two years, ten years, thirty years, even a moment has passed without her... But the truth is, it never really will. Two years ago, I looked at my phone at midnight on January 1st and recieved a text that read "Happy New Years I love you more than Dr. Pepper." This year I will look at her picture, and I will be just as grateful. Just as filled with love. And just as lucky that no matter how much time passes between our meetings, there will be another day that I will see her again.