Shift.

I shoot straight up, in the middle of the night. It's dark and quiet and peaceful, but the hair at the base of my skull is damp and I feel a cold bead of sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades. I can't catch my breath.
To my left, my baby is breathing softly. I press my hand, gentle and firm, on his stomach, to hear him grunt and be sure he's actually breathing and it's not my imagination shielding me. He grunts and snuggles his head into the mattress more.
To my right, my 4 year old shifts slightly, having snuck out of his own bed and across the hallway while I slept and crawled into bed beside me, and I hold my hand beneath his nose to feel his hot breath.
It's not enough, so I quietly slide to the bottom of the bed and sneak across the hallway myself, poking my head in the door and listening to my middle son snore and kick the wall beside him in his sleep, as he does when he's having a particularly thrilling dream.
I hear my dog drag himself from his spot in front of the front door, anticipating my footsteps padding the stairs to check on him next, the only one in the whole house aware of my nightly ritual since the end of February.
I glance over towards my fiance, snoring lightly on the couch, the light from the TV he fell asleep watching playing across his face, and ease down on the bottom step as my dog comes to kiss my face and then go back to his spot by the door, guarding us...... or soaking up the cool air from the crack underneath it.
I stand and go back upstairs, but I know I won't sleep yet, so I wander into the bathroom, sit on the edge of the bathtub, and drop my head into my hands. I am so tired.
I can feel my hands tingling with.... adrenaline? Fear? Rage? Probably just exhaustion. I press my lips together and breathe quietly through my nose because I don't want to accidentally wake the kids up and have to comfort them tonight. My mind wanders to undone laundry, the dishes I was too tired to do that I left in the sink, the groceries about to expire in my fridge, the toys on the floor I'll need to clear before allowing the baby free range... the ones my fiance will likely clean up in frustration with my lack of helpfulness in the morning. It wanders to clients at work, schoolwork, logistics of the day, of the trip to see my best friend in a few weeks, to workouts I need to do, to walking my dog. It wanders anywhere except to you, until it finally does, and I shake like a leaf in the wind at the enormity of your absence.
How do I go on?
I keep trying. I hold it together most of the time now. I laugh at  my kids most of the time now. I don't forget things as much now. I spend the majority of my time avoiding the fact that I am never going to see you again. And I do okay, you know, at that.
And I try to remember that the world isn't focused around my grief, that people die all the time, that my grief is not more than anyone else's, that everything isn't about the fact that you died one night and I am still alive without you.
But then, our brother has a senior night, and you were at the last one in the fall but you aren't now this spring. And they announced his parents and siblings and last time they said your name and now they don't. And I remember that  this is his big night, not mine, not yours and so I push back the tears pricking the back of my eyes, I swallow them down, and in an instant I am transported to a different time, a different place, a different lifetime, where I am explaining to this counselor Mom took me to in the eight grade about Mia and about how I can't sleep because she died and I don't know how to be, and I feel those tears coming up and she notices me swallowing those traitors down my throat, so that I can keep it inside me, a reminder that she was here, that you were here, the pain I swallow proof that something good existed that doesn't exist anymore.
When I try to explain that I'm not doing so good, it doesn't come out right and I feel a little selfish, and so I have been trying to not say much, you know?
I would normally call you because you always knew what to say, or not to say, when I got like this. I'm trying to be like that for our brothers and sister, but I don't think I'm getting it the way you would have.
I keep hoping I'll wake up and I won't feel so.... this way.
How have 3 months passed so quickly, though? At the same time, it feels so long ago already.
As though who I was when you were alive is an entirely different person than who I have become in your death. Like strangers, or old friends who might awkwardly chat over the produce cart if we ran into each other after we had a weird falling out.
I just keep wondering.
Who am I without you?
I don't know, and so I whisper back to my room, slide between the two sleeping children, and close my eyes, pray for darkness to drift from the room to my mind, and will myself to sleep.