In an apartment that hasn't really changed since her husband's death, on a desk that has been preserved exactly as he left it the morning he died: bills absently strewn about, his hat on the corner and his cell phone, charging—Elena writes letters to a dead man who will never read them again. She keeps the desk dust-free, she keeps his chair pulled out like he left it. Sometimes she looks at that desk and its all she can do to not throw up. Other days, she smiles at it.

The letters are in beautiful, white envelopes on thick, textured paper. They are all neatly collected with his name on each one and tied together with a beautiful, thick white silk ribbon. Elena's hand writing is a calligrapher's dream.

_________________________________

Marcus, I went out for Christmas.

I have become a turtle neck sweater. I struggle, sleepy eyed with the thoughts of you, teary eyed, perhaps, with the memories of you—to try and pull my head through the dark material of my days. But I give up half way, because it's hard. Because it's easier to give up than to fight half the time anyway and that's painful too because I have family.

Yes, my love, imagine me saying family in the exact manner that I used too. Maybe it's a sigh, a roll of the eyes, the little smile you used to tell me seemed so mysterious, patient, and exasperated all at once. And yes, family, with love and devotion.

So I went out at Christmas.

It's the loneliest time of year for us widows, Marcus. I just wanted you to know that.

I went out and I found it fitting my world was covered under a blanket of white. I don't think black is a very suitable mourning color; I think it should be white. (Persephone's wedding dress was white, after all, and she was in mourning the entire time). But the family kept creeping back into my mind. They won't let me become a bump in an apartment filled with your jackets that don't even smell like you anymore. They called and they slipped notes under my door as if they were children writing love letters to first crushes. (Not that I am complaining because by Gods, they have kept me sane in your absence.)

Marcus, I loved it. The cold sugar-snap-pea freshness of the air. The white. The crunch of my feet in the snow. The fact the entire family was at the inn—you remember that places? we went for tea there once and laughed until we cried—and it hurt so very nicely.

That scared me a little.

Because it means that I'm pulling the turtle neck over my head and I don't really want to. I just want to stay in it where it is warm. And dark. Just a little longer.

I love you and I miss you so much sometimes I lay in the middle of the floor and weep at the ceiling. I break apart a little bit less everyday, but that just means I am starting to forget bits of you. There aren't any words to describe the sort of panic that fills me when I realize the majority of healing means forgetting what made you broken in the first place.

I love you, Elena

Written in Elena's navy blue moleskin journal:

When we dated I had told him how I had hated diamonds and what they stood for. Bent-backs, blood and wars, greed and consumerism were things I did not want to wear on my finger and remind me of love. He agreed and said, with a boyish smile, 'Well if I ever wanted to marry a girl as stubborn as you, I'll buy her something other than diamonds.'

He bought me a star sapphire that against my finger I almost believed it was a little piece of heaven trapped in velvet blue. He set it in white-gold. I love silver, but he said it would have been too soft for hands always tangled in the messes of little ones.

He was always that thoughtful. He was perfect.

I don't think I want to go to heaven when I die. I want to become a little light in the sky. That way, when the night becomes too much to bear, when the silence and the rustle of sheets sound like hearts breaking, when memories are all that is left—someone like me will open their window or stand on the road and look up. They'll see me winking, a little star in velvet blue and they will take some sort of odd comfort from it. They will see a whole sky filled with tiny little lights and know that some where, maybe on one of those little dots, someone else is swimming through loneliness and looking back.

I want to thank him for loving me. I want to be a little light in someone's life.