I was eating dinner out last night, at a burger joint known for its french fries and chocolate milkshakes.
I don't eat beef, but they also make wonderful baked potatoes - the kind with salted skin that's almost as good as the steaming insides.
I ordered my potato and shake, and sat down underneath a window to the right of the door.
A man came in.
He couldn't have been more than sixty-five. Silver hair, horn-rimmed glasses, plaid shirt. Nothing special.
But his face...it was so sad. Not just sad, but melancholy and resigned, too, all at the same time. It was like he had been abandoned and left to wander through life alone.
And it made me start to wonder. What will it be like, years from now, when my love departs this world and leaves me behind?
Will I be able to survive that? With my support system gone, the single constant light in my life extinguished, with no hope of ever sparking again...what will be left for me?
I know, deeply, that you would want me to go on, to keep trekking this exquisitely miserable and yet uplifting earthly path. It will be hard...but I would do it, for you, if you wanted.
Just know that part of me will have died, with you. | 
