He loved to write everything down. Each day he picked up his journal and opened it up to write. Anything and everything went into it, even his most intimate feelings and the way he expressed himself through drawings. Every piece of advice he received and anything that freely flowed or his mind pushed, he put into the book. He did this for many years.    
    Then fall came. He had chest pains for many years, but they worsened, and by fall he was bedridden. No one ever knew of his constant chest pain. He never said anything. He never even acted like it hurt. It did not hinder his activity as far as others could tell, but he noticed it. 
    Some days, it would prevent him from too much activity, and when he started to feel the pain he liked to be alone so that no one could see him rubbing his chest to release the tension. He laid in his bed as the sun came up and stayed there all day. He stared at the moving clouds listened to the blowing wind. 
    Even the tree outside that took months to undress, from his bed he watched it shed every leaf. Through this down time his chest ached. It pounded so hard between his back and his nipple. Every heart beat brought a new chest pain. Then, one day when he was watching the tree shed its leaves, he left. He escaped from his beating chest and never returned. His body lay there, no longer in pain.
    She entered the room to find him missing. She saw his body, and the hands interlocked on the top of his chest, but he was no longer there. She wept until a small puddle surrounded her crying body. Her tears hit the ground and ran to the lowest point in the room, which was where she sat weeping. She wept in the puddle until her body had no more water inside. Then she cried out for help as she too was near death. 
    “How can I go on living?” she thought. “How do I make it to my natural deathbed without him by my side?. I cannot manage to live this life without my lover. When we met, we became one human, and now, I am just half, and I am the half empty one.”
    As the puddle begun to dry, the floor began to rattle. It was a slow and weak sound, almost like someone walking tiptoed in circles in the room. The sound allowed her to think about her surroundings as she was fully consumed with existential questions. She looked over toward the bed where his body lay cold and empty. Next to him was his latest journal. She sprung up like a boner, grabbed it and immediately opened it to read his writing. In her head his voice read out every word. She no longer felt alone. 
    She read his journal 57 times that day, front to back cover. Each time she understood something new. Reading his journal gave her the courage to leave his room. She kissed the dead body on the bed and left his room.
    She went to the book shelf where he kept all of his journals. There were hundreds of them. He even had a key hanging on the wall that opened the door to a storage shed in the backyard where he kept more.
    She dropped to the floor in front of the bookshelf and read each journal, one after the other. She lost 10 pounds that week as she did not eat for three days straight. She read from morning until morning. She slept unintentionally, right there on the floor with a journal in her hand. When she awoke, she continued reading. 
    She was not alone with his journals. She was together with him in that room. They talked to each other on every page. She was not melancholic the entire time, but experienced many relationship emotions. She even spoke to the journals after reading aloud what he wrote. They were like the two lovers she knew before he left her a few days earlier. 
    “OK honey, I need to eat,” she would say to his journals in between readings. “I’m getting hungry. Let’s finish this conversation afterward.”
    Then she would go prepare food. She always made enough for two, even though she ate alone. The second serving sat in the pan until it was cold. Then she put it into a container and into the refrigerator. She served herself the remains on late nights when she woke up alone.
    Soon after she ate, cleaned the kitchen and plates and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, she went back to the book shelf to talk to her lovers’ journals. She grew so good at having these conversations that she would put tabs in pages in order to know where her answer was when she asked him a question. 
    There were no longer any journals in the shed. They all piled up next to her. All of them filled with her notes and markers to know exactly where to look in order to keep the conversation going. 
    In fall of the next year, she sat there alone after eating and realized she had nothing left to know about him. She read everything. She kept a log of every answer to every question, and she also knew exactly how many times she read each journal front to back. By now, she could memorize what was on each page. Her log book was as wide as five journals combined. 
    “Let’s see, journal 59, entry 36,” she said. “I read that 337 times.”
    It was where he wrote about how he felt about love and who captured his heart the most. The answer was clear as day. It was her. She sat there reading about the love he had for her. In words, he could only describe what it must have felt like, but she knew that the words only captured a small portion of what he really meant. 
    She decided at that moment, after reading journal 59, entry 36, the 338th time, exactly what she would do. She would continue her conversation with him by writing down new journals. In these journals, she would have new conversations and write his answers based on what his other journals said. 
    Sometimes she would reference an old journal to ensure she understood exactly what he would say to her. She laughed when he told her he would marry her. She knew how he felt about marriage and knew that his love for her was stronger than diamond rings. Her conversations began to grow long again. They seemed to bring her back to the beginning when she first picked up his journal from the bed next to his dead body. 
    She sometimes forgot to eat again, and she had not left the house in months. The food in the refrigerator was almost gone, but she never realized it. She just kept writing and writing and laughing and crying and singing and rolling around on the floor like teenagers do while having a late night conversation. 
    Since his death, she unconsciously committed to talking to herself and writing down what she said. This is how she passed the time until she begun to fall asleep with the candle lit and pages and pages of conversations in front of her. She would wake up so hungry and thirsty but so eager to talk to him that the latter would win over any biological needs. 
    She no longer went to the kitchen as she knew there was nothing to eat, and stopped leaving the house as she knew no one would understand or recognize her. They may mistake her for a psychopath and try to take her to the hospital. She knew all she could do was write down everything she thought her lover would say until she finally joined him again.