Hold On My Love

They tell me love isn’t enough to save a person. As if I don’t already know. As if I haven’t spent. every morning since you left trying to negotiate with a God who loved you first. I still stop at the gas station without thinking. Big Red. Peppermint Altoids. Cherry ChapStick. Marlboro Blacks. My hands still believe I’m coming home to you. Sometimes I wear your hoodie because it still smells like cedar, cigarette smoke, and the kind of peace I never learned to make on my own. Sometimes I sit in the dark after a cigarette, play Never Gonna Change, and pretend you’re just in the next room, telling me you’ll be out when the song is over. You never were complicated. You loved God. You loved America. You loved old trucks, hoodies, country songs, and me. You carried storms so quietly I mistook them for silence. If I could rewrite one day— just one— I’d have held your face between my hands and told you that forever didn’t have to hurt this much. That the wedding ring belongs on your finger, not around my neck. I still pray to Mary. Not for a miracle. Not because I think she’ll send you back. I pray because I need someone to love you until I can again. Every Hail Mary ends the same way: Please… keep him close. Tell him I’m still talking to him. Tell him I still laugh at things he would’ve laughed at. Tell him his girl is trying. Some nights I dream you’re twenty-three. You smile. Call me “babygirl.” Reach for my hand like death was only a bad rumor. And for one beautiful second, I forget what waking up feels like. Then morning comes, and grief does what grief does. It empties your side of the bed. It steals the air from ordinary things. It teaches me how someone can be everywhere— in songs, in hoodies, in cigarettes, in prayers, in every quiet place where love has nowhere left to go. They tell me to let you go. But they don’t understand. I’m not holding on because I think I can bring you back. I’m holding on because loving you was the truest thing I have ever done. And until Heaven calls my own name, I’ll keep asking the Blessed Mother to kiss your forehead for me. I’ll keep saving the last lucky cigarette. I’ll keep wishing on impossible things. Not because I expect them to come true— but because the day we met, I loved you. And some loves don’t end when the heartbeat does.