It has been twenty-four hours since you've seen her.
You sit in the darkness of your small, shared apartment, and watch as the dog prowls around, whining, as though he too misses that which cannot be found. She was gone when you awakened in the morning, before dawn, and you have not slept since, but she has not returned, and no one has seen her. You've looked, and you've looked, but you have found nothing, and you are beginning to realize that she may not be returning at all. You wonder, as you sit there, why she might have left. Was it something you did, something you said? Did someone threaten her, or threaten you? Has she met someone else? Did she hate you so much that it drove her to leave without a word? You obsess over the last time you saw her, your mind turning over the past few days without pause, and you search for something, anything, which might provide an explanation.
But there is nothing. If something was bothering her, she never told you, and you know, then, that she's not coming back.
The pain that comes is unbearable. You would rather bear a thousand bullets instead, and you rifle through drawers for the bottles of pills she didn't know about, the little white tablets you took to help you sleep, to help you handle the burden of living. You never knew love could hurt this much, and you consider swallowing the whole bottle, maybe washing it down with some whiskey, but you don't. You can't. You take just enough to knock you out, enough to make you numb for a little while, and, you hope, enough to keep you from dreaming.