She hadn't moved from her window in over a day.

Watching for the impossible was something that she was content to do. It injected her with the faint hope that she might witness some of those precious memories once again. Maybe his decrepit old Clio, chugging along and spluttering to a grumbling stop right outside her house, or maybe the bicycle that he sometimes opted for instead, signalling his arrival with the ringing of a bell. It economised on both petrol and his nerves, he had always told her with a smile.

His smiles were gems. She had always watched in rapt fascination when his lips pulled back and curled upwards, his left cheek dimpling slightly when it lifted more than the other. His teeth were slightly crooked, the front two pushed back a little further than his incisors, always immaculately clean.

She shook her head, dragging her eyes from the unchanging scene outside. No point in dwelling on what was past, she tried to tell herself. Nothing can be done. He's gone.

Yet, in a way, he wasn't completely gone. He was ever-present in her head, raiding her mind like he often did the fridge.

"How do you never get fat?" she had teased him once, leaning against the doorframe and watching his lean frame crouch by the refrigerator, sifting through its contents.

He looked up at her and her smile widened. The dimple was back in his cheek as he grinned at her, his blue eyes shimmering like the sun-kissed surface of some perpetually tranquil ocean. His hair was a piece of art in itself, glowing with masterful strokes of brown and auburn and gold. It was tousled that night; he had just gotten up from bed for a midnight snack.

"I've been blessed in many ways," he told her, a note of seriousness in his joking tone, setting the results of his culinary conquest on the kitchen counter.

"How so?"

"Metabolism, for one," he began with a cheeky grin. His eyes crinkled with adorable laugh lines, the planes of his face catching the mellow yellow light spilling across the kitchen. "High energy drive. Lots of charisma," he listed, moving closer with every word.

His fingers fluttered lightly against her cheek, the mere touch setting her skin aflame. He murmured his final blessing against her forehead: "You."

Back in the present, she shivered at the almost tangible memories of his hands. By some cruel trick of the cosmos, fate had ensured that she would never feel those beautiful hands again. Those wonderful hands, with their much-abused fingernails, callouses and infinite gentleness.

But his touch wasn't all that she longed for. Nor was his smile.

What she longed for the most was the sound of him saying her name.

"Helena."

It was amazing how one simple word could be uttered with so much emotion, how it could mean so much. The sound of it in his mouth was exquisite, like chocolate melting slowly on the tongue. Whether it was a soft, intimate murmur or a faraway call, the sound was just as beautiful. His voice itself was sublime, like a million and one cultures compressed into one perfect peal. It was what had made him the best singer, the most incredible actor, her own personal reader.

The world would never see those qualities now, as they wasted away with his body under five feet of compact soil. Instead, they would bleed into the earth and nature would sing with his voice. The sun would burn with his brilliance, the flowers would bloom with his beauty and the trees would exhale his purity for mankind to breathe.

No, she thought, moving away from the window for the first time since his funeral. He would never be completely gone.