They say he is dead. Over and over they assure me, printing articles on the anniversary of his "unfortunate demise" from acute pneumonia. The over-paid and grammar ignorant news writers give a run-down of his best and most brilliant moments, as if to hammer the point home: there will be no more cases solved by Sherlock Holmes.

But I refuse to believe it.

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It's an ache inside me—I don't know how else to explain it. My memories seem softly drifted, covered in some lace tablecloth, so I cannot see them clearly. I see them through a mist, which makes it not annoying but calming, walking through a drifting garden of memories, blurred, as if painted—as if it's not what really happened, but what I wanted to happen. Not what is there, but even more how it is, the representation truer than the object.

My heart feels quiet and still within me, and I miss him.

I miss him so very much.

I wear his dressing-gown to bed nowadays; the softness of the material calms me enough to sleep.

I sit by my window, watching the stream of life, and see his face age before me. We grew old together...

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I wish I could hold him. It didn't matter to me, anymore, that he wasn't as strong. It didn't matter that he couldn't protect me. I wanted to protect him, now. I still needed him, in a way, and though he was so different, the twinkle in his eyes was the same, and so was the spark of friendship between us.

The pain in his eyes the last few days was horrible to watch...sometimes I couldn't be in the same room, I could not bear the sensation of my heart tearing. But I always came back.

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I turn it round in my hands, touching the grosgrain ribbon and feeling a smile at my lips.

Not everyone can wear a top hat. I've tried; one look in the mirror and I remove it immediately, it's simply too pretentious on me. I much prefer the solid bowler or perhaps a coach hat. Holmes was born to wear a top hat. The tall ebony of it complemented his own height and stark asceticism. He was almost a top hat himself, really…

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The pain returns, as it does from time to time. I see his face before me, and I cannot bear what I see. He fades before my eyes, and I'm powerless to stop it. What I hate most is his voice, sounding so weak, and so different from before. It breaks me.

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It's ridiculously simple: a heart so great cannot stop.

I think through the logic again, as I walk numb through the park, and try to outline the points--though there is only one point. He cannot be dead, because it makes no sense.

I have tried very hard to force some sense into it. I have tried a hundred times to accept it as truth, but it never works.

Can it be truth that his expressive face is stilled forever? Can it be truth that the greatest man I know is, in fact, turning back to dust even as I touch trees he has napped beneath?

No. Every time I tried that idea on, I laughed hysterically. I will not accept such nonsense, as befits a protégé of the only consulting detective in the world.

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I don't mind the dichotomy, I suppose. To know on one level he is gone, on another feeling a need to keep his tobacco at hand, in case he should come through the door.

No, I don't mind it. Though it splits my mind, it holds me together.

And if one day I come to understand, in mind and heart, and I am finally able to pack away his clothes and put his violin in storage, even that day I know I'll turn and say, "strange how the brain controls the brain, eh Holmes?"