In the In-Between Moments

Dear Vic,

I’ve been sitting with your words - the fragments you left behind in your journals. Sometimes they felt distant, almost like they didn’t carry the same love I feel so fiercely for you now. At moments, I caught myself wondering if you held me with less weight in your heart than I have always held you in mine.

But I remind myself: journals are only pieces of a life. They capture moments, frustrations, burdens of a particular day. They aren’t the whole story. They don’t tell of the two decades we shared, the home we built, or the son we raised together.

I don’t measure your love against mine anymore. I see now that you loved differently - in ways that weren’t always obvious to me, but were still there. You showed it in the things you kept, in the choices you made, and in the way you still wrote my name down as Kenzo’s guardian when you knew you wouldn’t be here anymore. That, too, was love.

And here I am, still carrying you. More than ever, now that you’re gone. My love has grown heavier and sharper, because I finally see how finite our time really was.

So even if your journals didn’t always write it plainly, I choose to believe your love lived in the in-between moments - in the quiet, in the choices, in the years we stood side by side. And for me, that is enough.

With care that still lingers,
— N