It's Friday night and I can stay in if I want to.

I had a really good evening, tonight. I came home and immediately practiced singing. It’s important that I spend the next couple of weeks on the song I’ll be singing with the university symphony orchestra. It’s not in my key so I really have to stretch my upper register to make sure I have all of the notes and that I can sing them with ease and lightness. I’m very excited about this.

So I sang and then I cooked dinner, which, most days feels unfamiliar. I don’t cook daily meals too much. I can cook big stuff, like spaghetti sauce or a giant pot of chicken soup; stuff I eat and then freeze in lots of containers for later dinners and lunches.

I liked cooking for Chris. He was a guy who got excited about presentation. I loved that. I learned from him the importance of choosing exciting colored vegetables to go with the color bread and whatever the main dish would be. I always dreamed up some sort of creative garnish to place atop the entree: a parsely twig, an orange slice, a flower, basically whatever I could find in the apartment that I knew would impress him. It was a sort of a fun little competition we would take turns having, trying to out-do each other with ideas.

I still remember the first time Chris cooked for me. It was very early in our relationship and when he invited me over for dinner, I thought it was very weird. Nobody had ever done that for me before. I was shy, but I went anyway. He cooked salmon, which I had never had before and around the fish on the plate, he placed various colored peppers, summer squash and zucchini. It was beautiful and when I reacted to it with surprise and delight, he became so happy. His face lit up. He was proud.

We talked that night. After dinner we moved into the living room and Chis lit a candle. There was no music and the TV wasn’t on. The only sound was the sound of the two of us talking to each other. That was weird to me, too. I commented on the silence and Chris said, “I like it quiet.” We talked a lot that night. We talked about our fears, our lives, our families and just regular everyday stuff. Then I left. It’s so strange to me that I ever used to leave. I can’t really remember what it was like before I knew him through and through, before we submitted our hearts to one another. Strange.

I happened upon a new television show tonight quite by coincidence. It’s called “Ghost Whisperer” and it stars Jennifer Love-Hewitt. She plays a medium who is visited by spirits who need help. Tonight’s show, strangely enough, was about a young woman grieving the loss of her fiance. The spirit of her fiance would not let her go. He stayed with her and made his presence known in very sweet, loving ways: a touch, a stroke, a feeling. She grew to need him around in order to feel comfort and he was unwilling to cross over and set her free. Together, they were holding on to each other, preventing each other from moving on.

The man’s heart had been donated when he died and was now beating in the chest of another man who had it transplanted in place of his own unhealthy heart which had caused him many, many years of illness. This man was very sad and lonely. After a lifetime of sickness, he did not know how to live a healthy life and be happy. The medium introduced him to the young widow and they sat and even though they talked only for a few moments, they felt an instant connection.

The medium tried to convince the fiance that he had to let go of the young woman and he decided to leave it up to her. If she told him to go, he would.

The show culminated with his spirt channelling through the medium telling his widow that he loved her very much and wanted to be with her all of the time. She could feel his presence and told him that she couldn’t go on without him, that she couldn’t do it without him. They were both face to face, though she couldn’t see him, and he kept stroking her face, her hands, her hair.

Finally the medium asked her if she liked the man she introduced her to. The widow started to talk about how she felt as though she knew him and although they talked about children for only a moment, she now felt as though she could return to her job as a school teacher.

The fiance, at that point, realized that he had to let go in order for his widow to move forward. She begged him to stay but in the end, he realized that he had to let her go, for her and for him, that she couldn’t love a dead man the way he needed her to and that he couldn’t love her the way she needed him to.

Out of the eternal love he felt for her and even though she fell apart, crying uncontrollably and begging him to stay with her, he crossed over, leaving her to get on with her life.

It was my life being played for me before my eyes on the television. I felt everything that this her character felt. There wasn’t dry eye in the house.

Tonight, Jennifer Love-Hewitt helped me heal. Not many people can say that and mean it. And wherever Chris’ sweet, sweet soul is tonight, I’m sure it’s vomiting.

Shneed