I recently had to explain the above picture to some new friends. The Cabbage pointed it out to everyone in the room and I found myself saying “that’s my late husband with a Stormtrooper.” This was not an acceptable answer for the Cabbage who replied “but why that picture?” I went with the simplest answer. I went with that picture because it’s funny. We were at the Medieval Fair in Norman and Stormtroopers appearing in Medieval times is nerdy genius. The more elaborate answer as to why that picture is that it is a capture of pure authentic joy. It is one of the few pictures I have of Chris where he is not making a face at the camera and it is a picture of Chris with something Star Wars, his favorite thing.

Most every single picture I own of the two of us, in everyone of them Chris is not looking at the camera. He is always looking at me.

There is a gap forming between when Chris died and now. I was scrolling through pictures, looking for something in particular, and I noticed that there are hundreds of photos in my storage that I must scroll through to get to the Chris years. It makes me think of the end of Titanic where they just show a bunch of photographs of Rose doing stuff and living life. The only difference is that I know Chris would have fit on that door with me floating in the Atlantic and I would made sure that he was on it with me. We both probably would have lost our feet to frostbite, but we’d still be alive. Chris dragged me to the theater four times to watch that movie. The first viewing was great, but by the fourth viewing, I was fed up with Rose and her wide-eyed, insipid, innocence and I still did not understand why it was that both of them could not fit on that giant door. Chris fell off into the ocean anyway and I went on to live a life and every day I feel that tether linking us get longer and longer. I worry that my rope isn’t long enough. I’m going to run out of length and stretch the line until it thins and breaks. Some time back, Michael mentioned that I might stop wearing my wedding rings after a certain amount of time. Like, if Michael and I are together for as long as Chris and I were, then maybe I could stop wearing them. I remember vaguely nodding my head without comment. The truth is that I don’t ever see me not wearing these wedding rings around my neck. They’re part of the tether. The weight of them resting just above my heart is what helps to keep that tether from fraying.

For Star Wars Day, my friend Jeff sent me a link to a trivia game based on all things Star Wars. It reminded me of all the times we played Star Wars Trivial Pursuit and how my answer to every question was “R2D2”. Meanwhile Chris would know random ships by their number. The game always came down to Chris and Jen with one of them winning or maybe tying. I did not beat Jeff’s trivia score. Too many questions about lightsaber colors and ship numbers, all the questions Chris would have the answers to. None of the answers were R2D2. None of the answers are ever really R2D2.

It is days like these that close the gap of the in between years.