1 year 7 months 4 weeks

It's been 1 year 7 months 4 weeks since we said goodbye...says the little ticker on the left of my blog.

How can it have been this long?

And April 15th is closing in rapidly. Eva's half birthday. She would have been exactly two and a half years old this Monday.

I feel like it is yesterday and a lifetime ago that I shared my air with the sweetest little girl I've ever beheld.

Eva is fading. She is not fading from my heart but she is fading from our lives.

Today Mike found two coins and he told Theodore to take one and give one to Little J. Only he said 'one for you Theodore and one for Eva'.  He quickly corrected himself and said it was for Little J. Little J laughed and said 'I'm not Eva!'

And I realized with sudden clarity how little we hear her name said. We don't tell Eva to put her toys away. I don't ask Mike to help Eva with her pajamas. We don't cheer for Eva when she pees in the potty. Mike doesn't ask me to buckle up Eva up in her carseat. She is simply not here.

As present as she is in our hearts her physical presence is absent. And I miss hearing her name.

I hate that she is becoming a perpetual lost baby. Smoke. Sadness. Butterflies. Tears. Wind. Windchimes. Sunflowers...all these things that represent her but that she is not. Not any of those things. My little lost girl...who I will see again but who is so not with me right now.

And it will not end. One day little J will have a friend and that friend will be born in October 2010 and it will come back to me how absent my girl is again, and again, and again.

And It never ends. It never ends