4 years without tangling her feet with mine when our alarm goes off. 1,462 days without her laughter. 209 weeks without her jokes. 48 months without her singing. 35,088 hours without her encouragement and support. 2,105,280 minutes without holding her hand. 12,53,16,800 seconds without gazing into each other's eyes.

If the entire age of the universe were compressed into one calendar year, with the Big Bang being midnight of New Year's Day and today being New Year's Eve, the first humans would have emerged well into the evening on December 31st. The Great Pyramids were built at 11:59:50. Just one lousy second before midnight, is when Christopher Columbus set sail from Europe.

By most scientific accounts, the universe was created 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang. The first stars were born about 200 million years after that. These stars last anywhere from 400 million to 7 billion years. These then exploded and sent heavier elements out in to the expanding universe. This about sometime in February of that calendar.

These heavier elements eventually coalesced into rocks, which eventually turned into planets. Earth formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, in August of our cosmic year. Earth is old, and not very large, cosmically speaking. About 22,000 miles in circumference. At least 100 Earths can fit inside Jupiter, and at least 100 Jupiters inside our sun, which is just an average sized star.

And then here we come along, made of all the same elements that the first stars were made from. Humans emerged 85 million years ago, at 9:24pm on New Year's Eve on our cosmic calendar.

From all that randomness and chaos, we ended up happy together. I bring all this into context, because at one point I was extremely angry with the universe. We got such a short snippet of time together, and even the rest of our lives together would never have been enough.

But I can no longer hold that anger. It does me no good. With much thought and some forced perspective, I have had to become grateful for this short blip of time in this infinitely large universe.

I miss you Jennifer every singe day that I am alive, and that will always be the case. You live on through me, through the influence you had on my life and my thoughts and my perspectives. I still try to act the way I think you'd want me to act, I still treat people the way you'd want people to be treated. I still make jokes that you found funny, and I still take seriously things we both agreed were important. None of this changes the fact that I wish dearly that you were still here with us on Earth, and that we could still fulfill all the dreams we shared.

The universe can be a cruel place. But it does us no good to also ignore its beauty.



We are only here for a moment.



