A new normal.

I had almost 20 years of you in my life. 20 years of celebrating and complaining about our live.

I remember us walking on the 23rd and Ely subway stop, and you were telling me about how you don't like treadmills. You had started "gymming" because you felt you were getting fat but you refused to get on treadmills. Or for that matter those moving walkways either. I remember you complaining so much about being fat after you had gained weight from the chemo. I told you to stand next to me, and you'd feel a lot skinnier.

I miss you every time I say I am fat.

I miss you in tiny little details.

I am taking a stats exam next week, and I remember the time I came back from seeing you in Bombay and I had a stats exam. I was sure I was going to fail. You wrote to tell me, that if I fail, you would take me to Paris. If I pass, I should take you to Paris.

I miss you in mundane things.

Your death makes no sense. I look through our pictures, re-read your letters to me, re-watch your wedding videos, look at your facebook page a thousand times to make sense of what happened.

How could this really have happened?

How could you be so alive and happy? Then so miserably sick and then dead. In two years.

People tell me, this is going to be my new normal. A regular existence without you.  A new normal. A recalibration of my emotional scales. 

I still reach out to text you something, since I know you don't pick up the phone anymore, then I stare for a while at the phone. That is my new normal.