I use the term we a lot when I reference this situation.  The truth is that we means I. 

Lately I have been able to get J to help me set the traps, though the request is always met with grumbles and sighs.  Yes J, I know there are more important things to do.  Work, video games, beer, riding your motorcycle.  I understand how those things are important—everyone needs an out sometimes.  I do understand. 

But J, what about the other person who lives in this house?  The one you've got to see becoming nothing.  Stop asking if I'm mad at you for God's sake.  Christ, yes!  I'm mad at everything.  Furious even.  Me.  You.  The Situation.  Those people.  God.  Mostly, though, I'm just so full of tears that I can only let out in small increments.  I don't have any small talk, any smiles or laughter, any witty discussion left.  I don't have any fights or urging.  I don't care if the phone rings off the hook or the house doesn't get clean.  The dogs escaped today, ran all over the place, and I didn't even know it until you told me when you got home.  I look at this mess around me, the neglected things who won't be put away, food still on the counter, a pile of laundry so expansive I can sleep on it, and I feel nothing.  The disarray means nothing.  Nothing in comparison.

You don't know it, because you have the attention span of a gnat, but the person you see when you get home from work, the person who makes your dinner but rarely says a word, the person who sits alone in the living room all night so she can check the traps, the heartbroken person who slips into bed at dawn and prays desperately for a dream of Sunkist...she cries alone everyday and night.  In bed, at the computer, on the couch, staring out the window, sitting on the dirt at 2:31 AM while singing You Are My Sunshine and hoping Sunkist will respond to the song I've sung him forever. 

Fury and pain so deep I can't even let it bubble to the surface.  Because J, you don't know what's in here.  You'd surely make your way to the nearest phone and commit me if I once cried the way I need to.  So I hide it.  Hide the real devastation.

My mind has jumped into the routine of questions upon question, plagued by self-doubt:  What if he's not around here?  What if he somehow did end up in Pinedale?  How could that have happened?  What if he rode in your truck to your work?  What if everything?  What if anything?  What if he never again sleeps in my bed?

Grief.  It's not supposed to be like this now, yet.  I'm supposed to have hope.  Somewhere deep down there's hope—I continue to trap, continue to call him.  But the tears sliding down my face are constant reminders that everything's not right.

And maybe will never be.