A good year.

I woke up this morning with my sister staring intently into my eyes. She was laying on a bed about a meter from my own. We'd been forced back into our childhood sleeping arrangement, our parents snoring in the next room, by an unexpected interstate trip.
She whispered my name and maintained eye contact."It's not alive, but there is something next to your face" she said, always good in a crisis, always slipping into damage control mode.

Ew. Mush and a little wing. Vague, half asleep recollections of something crawling on my arm came back to me. The rest of him was not found until later that morning when my sister spotted his mangled body just outside the bathroom.

And today is two years since you wrote that final note. And as much as I tried to enter that space, you know the one, the space where I recognise I have grieved you but I am still mourning you, the one where I miss my husband and feel angry at the world, that special little place in my mind where i miss you and hate you all in the one impulse, I found that I could not.

Because I got to wake up this morning. You didn't, the cockroach certainly didn't, but I did.