Written for the contest "Welcome To The Void". Here are the conditions the author wrote:
"In 200 words or less; Free verse, 
Tell me about what you feel is the void in your life. I want vivid imagery and true sincerity. 
What is it and how it makes you feel? Do you think it can be filled?"

So I wrote about my daily negotiations about Juliet's absence. I live it every day. Sometimes I make that day busy - if I concentrate on something else, I'm safely away from the hole, just as I would be when she was alive and I would be at work. I'd think of here then too. There are days I will read every word of the news, or spend hours playing sudoku or another game on the phone, to avoid getting court in a spiral of grief where I play with thoughts of joining her. Then I read some of the many love letters we wrote to each other during our courtship, or our lives as she recorded them in her diaries. They don't fill the hole, but they blunt its power: Juliet protects me even in death. And when I go to sleep, I program myself to avoid the memory of that final short period of calling the ambulance, and having her heart stop 5 minutes before they arrived, literally collapsing from my arms, the useless CPR from me and them. She never wanted to die in hospital, always in my embrace, and was granted that wish. But the hole is here. She is not here. She sleeps in a colder bed. I can face that memory in the dark, but I cannot sleep with it, so I program a happier memory - our courting days, our honeymoon, holidays together, alone or with Jessica and Christopher. Joy to spin me counter to the grief, to orbit the hole but not be drawn in.

It won the silver award for this contest, out of 27 entries.