the holes left behind

When something suddenly disappears there is a time when nothing is left behind. That sound of the sonic boom is the air snapping closed around the hole in the air left by the plane.

They say that nature abhors a vacuum and so the hole left in my spirit and in my life will gradually have something else seep in to fill it.

By this I mean that my life is normally filled with many things and thoughts as well as with Anita. For me in my life I did not go very long in the day without thinking about her. At work (in conversations) I would make comparisons with things we have done / were doing, or things she/we liked, when hiking I would either be talking with her or when alone see something that she would like and show her. Even to just be grumbling about conflicts or issues we've had.

So the sudden removal of her from this world (and it was very sudden) has left me with empty spaces, a sort of vacuum in my life.

Its hard to explain but if you take this image as a sort of representation of my life, with each colour being something that occupies my mind (Anita, my work, hobbies, home repairs ...).

• at work I would think of things or see things I wanted to share, I still think of these but that leads me to remember she isn't here
• driving in the car I look over and see she's not there
• on my motorbike I can't feel her behind me
• noone sits across from me at the dinner table

I have tried to represent Anita with the blue. If you look carefully there are smatters of blue in almost everything and sometimes joining things together (for instance when Anita was the bridge for me into an activity).

Now I have removed the blue and you can see the gaping holes left by her sudden removal as well, as the thinning out of areas where there were smatters of her influence or just me thinking of her.

This is the vacuum of which I mean. Those large empty ares of white which are now empty times in my life, but there is also now less substance in all the other areas too. But worse than empty they serve to remind me that she isn't here.

Some areas become almost invisible and unstable without her, while other areas just have points of time where I am reminded of her. When Anita first passed away I was totally consumed with her loss. I would say I almost had nothing in my life except for a great wrenching sadness of her passing and wondering things like "why" and "how".  In this later stage I find that when trying to do the normal things (even those which don't involve her) her absence still has an influence.

My life has more 'substance' than air, so I'm sure it will take a long time for those emtpy places to be displaced by life in comparison with the bang of air rushing in to fill the empty space left by the plane.