John,

It's been four months since I've spoken with you. It's been four months and I wonder if you know that. I wonder if you know anything where you are, if you feel the persistent passage of time or anything beyond the stark finality of sleep. You'll forgive me for the belatedness of this letter, because you know that I am stubborn and realistic, and I didn't think that there was any point. You've always let me get away with far too much.

I know I needn't tell you that these four months have been the longest of my life, or that my heart's most desperate desire is just to feel yours beating. You know I have never been a religious man, but I find myself impetuously hoping that there is something after this, if only that I may once again feel your breath on my skin. I know that it's naive, and fanciful; in another time, I'd have called it foolish. But I could not carry on without the possibility of our meeting again, and so I find that hope is all that is left.

I still haven't reconciled it with myself, the circumstances of your death. I still haven't been able to speak the words out loud. That it was you and not me, was, for some time, a source of profound guilt, and now is a source of confoundment. I am cruel and shortsighted and selfish, and you are rare and magnanimous and good; now I am here and you are not and this world is lesser for it.

I never expected to live a long life, John — I can scarcely picture either of us, old and grey and crotchety — but I never imagined having to put you in the ground. That we didn't go together, clinging to one another through some final firefight like star-crossed lovers on a silver screen still feels erroneous somehow, like the universe has made a mistake. Most of all I find it impossible to fathom that one who burned so brightly in life may blink out so immediately, that death isn't just another bogeyman that we could elude through sheer force of will. If anyone could outrun him, it's us.

Sometimes I think that it hasn't hit me yet. I've grown accustomed to missing you, to the weight of solitude and that ceaseless pain in the cavity of my chest, but I don't know that I fully comprehend your absence. Sometimes, when it's late and the snow has driven all of the activity off of the street, when I am in our bedroom whispering your name like a prayer in the dark, it's like you've been gone a lifetime. And yet I still find myself reaching for your mug in the cupboard. I still go to sleep at night waiting for the weight on your side of the bed.

I can't listen to Elvis Presley anymore, you know. You used to hum it, did you realize, when you made breakfast? Always the same two songs because I scarcely think you knew any others. I was generally sat at the table, always so imperatively busy with this or that, and I never did eat. But you made it anyway. I heard it today, one that you favoured, drifting out the open door of some nondescript shop. Would you believe that I was actually reduced to inertia, freezing right there on the sidewalk like some poor lost soul? The melody had scarcely reached my ears over the sounds of the city when a wave of fondness overtook me, traitorous and cloying, such that I had to stop to catch my breath. You'd laugh, if you were here, at my sentimentality, and I would give anything to hear it. It seems not even I am immune.

I think when we love someone we idealize them beyond compare, augmenting their excellence until we think we've found the world's first perfect person. The greatest secret is that in my case it's true. I want to hear you laugh, as you so often do, candid and without restraint. I want to lie beside you as you sleep, catalogue the fluttering of your eyelids and watch the quiet rise and fall of your chest. Most of all I want to touch you, to feel the familiar beating of your heart beneath the pulse points in your skin, strong and steady as you have always been. It's been four months since I've held you, felt you warm against my breast, and my arms are the worst off for it. I find there are a lot of things I miss.

They say that death isn't the end, that there are fault lines in this great, cruel curtain, that the separation is not quite absolute. There are tales of contact, of comforts — transcendental visits from those long gone — but I've never been privy to them myself. You know I've always regarded those fantasies with a certain degree of skepticism, and though I find myself wishing beyond measure for their legitimacy, I still hold that they're a construct of the mind. I haven't been visited by your phantom in the night. I've not felt your presence in a sunbeam, or heard your voice in the falling rain; I expect it's because my mind knows that nothing it might fabricate could compare to the truth.

And so I've been clinging to your footprints like precious stones, those little tangible reminders that you were here. Maybe a day will come when a stray sock beneath the sofa won't feel like brushing a live wire, but I won't welcome it; more than anything, I fear the inexorable ebbing of your presence. I'm terrified that there will come a time when I'm no longer able to catch your scent on your pillowcase, when the last specks of your toothpaste fade from the sink. And I know that it's ridiculous, and by all accounts I should be making progress by now, but how can I be expected to clear your clothes from the wardrobe, to put your books away and take your name off our accounts, when I still can't bring myself to change the batteries in the smoke detector because that's the set that you put in it when you replaced them in the spring?

I can hardly stand that time keeps moving forward, creating a new past that you are not a part of. Everything I do is the end of an era. Every piece of you is a treasure, a ration, and I can hardly bring myself to indulge. During my time away, the time you like not talk about, I devoured you. Your old medical journals, anatomy textbooks, draft upon draft of papers and grant proposals became stolen hours in Moscow, Bangladesh, Cairo, Sudan — night after night spent scouring every hasty scrawl in each and every margin because even the smallest scrap of you helped to make the unbearable separation that much more palatable. I don't think I ever told you. I still haven't forgiven myself for that, for leaving you, and if you felt even a fraction of this I don't think I ever will.

But you are gone now, and there will be no new notes in the margin, so I find myself hoarding them like a dying man desperate for breath. I don't know how long they will have to sustain me. I don't know how many more sunrises I will have to endure alone. I've replayed your voicemails so many times that I've lost count, but the most recent remains unopened — the one you left me at the beginning of November — because I am lost in the desert and it feels too much like drinking the last of the water. And I'm sure that it's inane, just an ordinary message, but then I think that it's the last new words I might ever hear you say to me and I just can't bring myself to listen.

I don't think that I will ever fully recover from the loss of you, John; without you, I am one half of a whole, shattered and hollow, eternally drawn to a partner who lies just beyond my reach. I am breathing through lungs that are more scar tissue than skin, but the worst days are coming less frequently. I think this all sounds terribly self-indulgent, but I want you to know that you needn't worry for me. When you first left, mon coeur, I wanted nothing more than to follow you. I was adrift, in mind and in soul, and it pains me to admit that I dabbled in old habits. In my desperation I was selfish, heedless of anything but a means to quell the panic that rose at the thought of carrying on alone. I think the others acquiesced, quietly indulged my self-destruction, if not as a justification but as an understanding — a foreseeable response to the agonizing pain of your passing. But that was the last time.

I have an obligation to you, and to myself, to those who have shown me love unconditionally and helped to ease my way time and time again. To try to walk again, without you and without the chemical crutch, is a task as daunting as any I have ever faced. And while I won't ever be able to fill the void that your absence has left, for your memory, darling, and mine, for my brother and my mother and our friends, I will persevere. The pain is still new. It is raw and potent and some days it is crippling — but not all the time. I've stopped screening phone calls. I'm working again. I will survive, and perhaps, in time, I may even hope to prosper. Time does not heal, but it accommodates; I want you to know that I am holding it together.

I know you would encourage me to move on, to try to find someone, but we both know there's nothing for it. There was only ever you. What I find most difficult to reconcile is that nothing has changed, least of all my feelings for you. Death has ended your life, but we are still a we. I am still in love with you, but now I am here alone. I've come across a great many souls in my time upon this earth...strong, remarkable, kind people — who pale in comparison. They have the advantage of anatomy, corporeality, but they don't shine as you did. You, dead, are so much more than anyone else alive.

Sometimes I consider that sublimity, your private smiles and trigger finger, and I want to keep every atom to myself. But the world deserves to know you, in mind and heart and soul; you are not mine to keep. You came into my life in an instant and changed it wholly, barreling past every single wall I'd spend the last thirty years constructing. You made me better — right to down to the bone — and I don't think that two people ever were happier than we have been. I tried to sit and think upon our time together, to re-explore those memories tucked safely away within my mind's eye, but I don't think I am strong enough for that. I hope you will forgive me for my weakness, but I find I'm not yet ready to contemplate precisely what I've lost.

I would have stood beside you until the world stopped turning, and I will love you until the very end of time. I adore you, John — more than life itself — and not a moment goes by that I do not wish you were still here with me. I hope that you find peace where you are, and know that I am counting down the days until we can be together again. You have made these years the best years of my life.

I will forever remain very sincerely yours,

Sherlock Holmes