The End of the Novel

I finished going through the entire huge 4585-page document that is the collection of saved texts between Adri and I a couple of minutes ago.

All day I saw the page number that I was currently on increase in tandem with the calendar days quickly falling away one by one as her final day and final text kept approaching relentlessly. I felt hopeless, unable to make it stop, unable to freeze the snapshot of time and her consciousness that was represented on the page, little conversations about the important and the mundane that simply kept marching on towards the dreaded finality that was to come.

It’s odd, and was surprising to me, that these conversations that read like a multi-act script spanning a decade could create such a connection to her.

More than a photograph. 

More than the inscription within a greeting card. 

More than a voice mail. 

More than a video.

Somehow, these texts drew me in and totally captivated me and I relived those moments as real moments that were still with me instead of what they really were: echoes of a life that is gone forever.

While I was reading it was now, it wasn’t last May or the summer of 2021 or Bryce’s first day of school. It was now, an experienced past relived in a present that often feels empty without her. The echoes reverberated inside my head, and it was if she was still here, that past not past but present once again, and I got a little respite from missing her.

It was odd, and unexpected.

But since I was so drawn into that world again my brain was tricked a bit into not remembering the real reality, and when I saw those pages mount up and approach the final page number, I was filled with dread at coming to the end.

It was like when you are in the middle of reading a great book that you simply don’t want to end. You know you’ll miss all that the author has created: the characters, the tone, the wordplay, the settings, the plotline… but you can’t stop, and you let the inevitable happen, because you don’t really have a choice. You let the book end.

And so I did, and as I read her final text to me on page 4585 I of course wished and hoped and begged that there would be another text, that this wasn’t really the end, that this could continue. I wasn’t ready to let it go yet.

But it was the end; there’s no more. And of course I broke down.

It was my last hurrah, really, with her, and I’ll miss her tremendously the rest of my life.