"This is a hard speech for me to make. For obvious reasons it is hard, but it will also be hard because there is so much I could talk about, and so little space with which to say everything Bella meant to me.
"I could talk about the way her laugh made me feel, how beautiful her face looked when she was sleeping, that dangerous glint in her eyes when she was angry – so many things I noticed, learned about her in the precious few moments we had together.
"Bella and I were together for approximately eleven and a half months, or three hundred and fifty-one days, or 505,080 minutes. Any way you divide it, we were together for a painfully short amount of time, but even that is too much to document in the few short minutes I have to make my final goodbye to my wife, my first and only love.
"Bella's name was the most beautiful sound in my world. 'Say it loud, and there's music playing/ Say it soft, and it's almost like praying.' Every time I was lucky enough to hear her use her own name, or hear someone else talk to her, or, the best of all, to use my own, undeserving lips to produce that sound, those two beautiful, haunting lines from West Side Story always crossed my mind. Say it soft, and it's almost like praying. How true that is.
"I was not in love with Bella from the very beginning. In fact, for so long a time I did everything I could to avoid her – a sin which I now find hard to forgive myself for. How dare I waste any second that I could have spent with her trying to get away? But when I did see the light, it was all at once – a sort of reawakening, if you will. And suddenly I realized how foolish I had been, and after that I was never the same. My family, our family, can attest to that.
"I have decided from the start that I will not talk about these last few days with Bella. Not only is it impossible for me to talk about, it is impossible to describe how utterly unbearable it was to watch Bella turn from the strong-willed fighter she always had been to an exhausted girl.
"There were happier moments in our relationship, though – of course there were. Our shared laughs, jokes, kisses, even smiles made the warm love I felt for her surge through me in a surge of magical electricity. I lived for that feeling.
"When she was upset, a dark shroud was cast over my vision and I could not be happy until I saw the beautiful smile play with her lips again.
"Bella was my world, my whole world. That's why I asked her to marry me, and there is nothing that can compare with the feeling I had when she said yes. My heart did cartwheels inside my chest, burning all the while with that golden love that filled my whole being. You can't know the intensity of this feeling until it happens to you.
"Mine and Bella's earliest relationship could probably best described by a passage in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It is, in my opinion, one of the greater works of English literature. Mr. Rochester – Edward Rochester, which greater proves the comparison – speaks about his darling Jane, 'It was astonishing to see how quickly a certain pleasant ease tranquilized your manner: snarl as I would, you showed no surprise, fear, annoyance, or displeasure at my moroseness; you watched me, and now and then smiled at me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe. I was at once content and stimulated with what I saw: I liked what I had seen, and wished to see more. Yet, for a long time, I treated you distantly, and sought your company rarely…I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade – the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem.' As I said before, at the start I avoided Bella, though I cannot deny I was attracted to her even then. Why I tried to ignore what my heart was telling me then, I cannot say, but I am glad it finally managed to win out over my mind, and I am inconsolable my mind was ever stronger.
"I will not talk, either, of that dark, seven-month gap in our relationship – anyone who knew Bella at all knows to what I am referring. Though it was a very real, and, though hard to admit, necessary part of our story – without it, I know that we could not have understood our love for each other to the depth that we did when we were married – I cannot speak of it. The memories are too painful, and eulogies are not for sad, gloomy memories.
"There are so many other moments that I could speak about, but I don't know where to start. It is similar to reading all the books in the library of Congress – a feat so immense that finding the proper place to start is much harder than anything the task incorporates. And I know many of you would be bored if were to describe everything that we went through together. So, I won't speak of any because it's impossible to choose. Were I to begin, I would have to finish, and that would days to recapture for you all.
"I wish that I had begun a diary, so that I could go back now and try and comfort myself with what we once had, what I once felt. But I had believed then that we would survive. The rest of the world could crash down around our ankles, but Bella and I had to still exist together. We could both of us have died, so long as we were together.
"And now she's gone, and I remain, and I realize that Fate is a cruel thing. Obviously I realized that we could be apart, but I always assumed that our lives would turn into one of Bella's favorite English romances, and we would always be together. Fate disagreed with me. He punished me for my naivety, my foolish ignorance of what could happen. And now I'm left wondering if, if I had realized that Bella could die in a way that I could not protect her from, she would still be here today. That Fate would have let us be. I prefer to think nothing would be different, because if it were, the guilt of knowing that I could have stopped this but didn't would eat away at my already broken heart and I know, for a fact, that I could not be standing here today. I would be curled up in a corner somewhere, begging to die.
"Bella is my wife. She still is, because the vows we both spoke at our wedding were very specific in saying, as long as we both shall live. As I am not yet dead, Bella is still my wife. And I had not yet said goodbye when I wrote this speech.
"I had hoped this could help me say goodbye, help me understand why she was ripped from me so soon after we were joined together. It hasn't. I am nowhere closer to healing from this monstrous, bleeding bullethole that is inside me than I was when I first heard the news, and I'm not sure that I will ever heal at all, though many people will, I know, tell me after I'm finished that time heals all hearts. If that is true, then it will take more time than I have left for this life.
"Though I am nowhere closer to recovering from this grief, I do hope that it helped all of you to further understand Bella, as I knew her. Please just say you do, and then try not to forget this girl that changed my life so completely. I know that I never will."
Thanks to TheSingingGirl. Please review.