It's All Coming Undone

I've been through an indescribable journey of emotional turmoil over the past year. There were days that left me feeling hopeful and others that seemed to inflict maximum psychological damage as they dragged on for what felt like an eternity. I've experienced a range of sadness which I would have previously thought impossible. Sometimes I could successfully conceal my despair, but often it was plainly read by those who knew me well.

As days and months have passed, I've seen my life steadily deteriorate toward inevitable catastrophe. I've known it was coming, but overwhelmed by ennui I've been little more than a witness to its relentless approach. Each day as of late has been a chance to experience the loss of you anew. As the weather begins to carry upon its chilling airs your fragrance and memory, all things sensed bear your unmistakable signature. Every detail speaks to my fondness for you.

Meanwhile, as I struggle desperately to salvage a life amidst crushing emotional strife, I now see the culmination of my apathy realised. I've lost my job, I've run out of money, I've distanced myself from friends, I have starved myself of affection, I've forfeit positive relationships, and I've sit idly by as the walls and beams of my life have begun to crumble. I now fear, though fear may not be the most accurate descriptor, that I shall be crushed beneath the rubble of my failed and miserable life. Even now, it feels unnatural to describe it as a life, for it is scarcely such without you.

I hesitate to use the word fear, because it implies that there may be a more favourable outcome to that which seems inevitable. I don't fear it, so much as I suspect it with considerable certainty. Knowing that my imminent destruction and fundamental loss of personhood is now unavoidable, I find it ever more difficult to mobilise against it.

Marie,

I have loved you deeply and honestly. I have struggled in your absence because you taught me how beautiful life could be. I, as it turns out, could not have known just how crucial to that beauty was your very presence. Without your spellbinding beauty to frame my perspective of the whole world, I am faced with the dour, bitter, cold, unfeeling, tundra of hopeless, mere survival.

I had envisioned so many wonderful experiences we could share. You could make my world come alive and renew my fascination with things that may have otherwise seemed dull. With you I had hoped to learn and to travel. With you I had hoped to fight through the darkest and deepest struggles life dared present.

Without you, I am nothing. I am a living body devoid of purpose. My soul dies a little bit each day, but just enough that I feel it's decay but not so much there will none the next day. Lest I finally know rest, I awake each morning to begin the process anew.

I never deserved you, and I readily admit that. You were too good. Too pure. Too promising. One thing I am sure of though, is that I never forgot how lucky I was. It's hard now to see it that way, as my life plummets toward its final thud from cliff to ancient river bed, but I do retain the vague and distant memory of how it felt when first we kissed. As balancing on the precarious edge of a chasm, depth unknown, our hearts raced as we found ourselves enraptured by previously foreign sensations. The risks of treading such a dangerous terrain momentarily surrendered us to our most honest and sincere connection. Never before or since have I felt anything close to that bond. I feel closer now to the dry and neglected, drafty and desolate, rock bottom from where blissful peaks of joy and hope exist only in beleaguered imagination.

I have, with surprising absence of despair, decided to abbreviate the pitiful and laboured existence I have, for no other reason than efficiency, gone on describing as my life.

I Need You

There are certain things needed by any living creature to ensure its survival. When any one of these things is lacking, systems in the body begin breaking down. Signals are sent to the brain indicating which things require replenishment and it is a matter of instinct to know where and how to satiate those needs. When satisfying the basic requirements for survival becomes impossible, the only thing left to do is find some measure of peace in anticipation of inevitable demise.

I have been able to satisfy most of my fundamental needs since last seeing you, but my body has been relentlessly crying out in debt of one last piece of the puzzle. Just as thirst calls to mind images of water, and fatigue conjures sensations of sleep, the ache I feel perpetually engenders visions of you. You are all I see and all I hear. My body is screaming for help. I am flooded with the desperate yearning of my being to be satiated by your touch and your kiss. I can not suppress it any more than I could suppress hunger. It defines my existence and I survive in only spite of it. It, this implacable desire, will soon consume what's left of my mind and ensure the course of my ultimate downfall.

It's possible to be obsessed with a thing when that the acquisition of that thing is unrelated to basic survival. No one would characterise the starving as merely obsessed with food or the naked as obsessed with shelter. As I measure and observe the deterioration of my own mental infrastructure, I am painfully aware of an insatiable need, ever present and ever prominent.

Reminders

It's been almost a year since I last saw your face. Almost one year since I last heard that beautiful voice apart from my dreams. A year since I last felt a glimmer of hope for my life. The intervening eleven lunar cycles have seemingly in mockery come and gone unaffected while my mind and heart have cycled in continuous circles of pain and depression.

I thought, if I were to completely change my surroundings and take a new job, I could fool people into thinking I was normal or even happy. I also thought I was succeeding in that. Comically, within days of knowing me, people have begun to detect an overflowing, unmissable, stench of sadness. Pure sadness, as I've come to learn, is something which can not be hidden or disguised. Not for very long, that is. People tend to pick up on it.

I try to avoid arbitrary sentimentalities, but as the anniversary of the worst day of my life approaches, I am finding it increasingly more difficult to extract a sense of worth out of my life.

If you only knew how little and insignificant a thing had to be to trigger in me an overwhelming wave of sadness, I think you might even laugh. So I'll close my eyes and hear it. Painfully beautiful.

Changes

I never could have imagined how drastically and comprehensively my life would change as a result of knowing you. The change has taken place not only in the realms of emotion and personal perspective, but in my career, goals, relationships, and decisions. It's true that to assume foreknowledge of one's outcomes is to ensure a sequence if inevitable disappointments, so I have been learning to embrace the unpredictability of my future. Nevertheless, as it shan't include your physical companionship, it scarcely proves to be one worth pursuing.

I've managed to shift my approach from total apathy to its slightly nuanced cousin, passivity. All things remind me of you and in doing so restore my ultimate focus. My greatest sources of happiness and pain are one in the same. Had I been warned prior to knowing you that such a state of being could even be possible, I may have acted differently I suppose, though, that one of the paltry free gifts awarded us in life is our inability to express, much less understand, pain until we have experienced it. For that reason, even when warned we rarely take the path of caution but instead dive head-first toward certain demise.

I see this as at once an utter failure of the human intellect and a merciful glitch in comprehension.

Not a Night

Not a night goes by without some remembrance of you working it's way into the forefront of my cognisance. It finds little resistance though. Perhaps I have become accustomed to the pattern so that I bother not to fight it. I'm inclined to think, however, that in comparison to all other thoughts vying to occupy the limited real estate of my brain, images and memories of you shine through effortlessly as symbols of life's most brilliant and timely repose. My body alights. My heart eases. Staring deep into your eyes, as I remember them, I see nothing else. The warmth I once felt resting my weary head upon your shoulder overtakes me in a wave of indescribable comfort. As long as I hold fast to that splendid vision, I feel no pain. Even now.

You never once failed to make me smile, and still today your record holds true. Its true too, that I am occasionally stricken by the immobilising despair of being eternally in your absence, but I continue to grow toward a place of compromise. I can balance the pain against the joy I feel in my memories.

It is my usual day's pursuit to endure the necessary evils of work that I might rest each evening upon the pillow with you by my side. I should die before forgetting the wonderful image of your peaceful face laid sweetly against your pillow, gazing back at me.

The Charade

Running into a group of your friends reminds me of the unspoken agreement amongst the wounded to speak not of the source of pain which is the only things still binding us. We exchange pleasantries and desperately share trivialities so as not to appear entirely disinterested or hopelessly preoccupied by you. This act is painfully transparent to all involved, yet our nature insists on its continuance.

Not surprisingly, I've been utterly paralysed by refreshed thoughts of all that I have so pathetically longed for these past months. It never does get easier. That void remains.

It's been suggested to me that I discontinue all thoughts of you and rededicate my life to starting anew. This suggestion is about as useful to me as the suggestion that I simply stop thinking at all, just as possible to fulfil.

You Are Here

I should feel silly by now...  To continue pining for you, yearning, missing...

I still awake feeling as though you were just in my arms but vanished with the very opening of my eyelids.  I close them in hopes of your return but its too late.  I lay still and savor the lingering feeling of your weight and your warmth.  It is that feeling which now represents the sole source of happiness in my life.  Often, I will look at a picture of you, the one you took for me as you laid in bed with your head upon the pillow, and I can convince myself that I'm looking at you in the flesh.  I reach out to embrace you, but I feel the cold sheets at arms length and am quickly reminded of my dismal fate.

Insanity, it is often said, is the repetition of behavior with expectations of differing outcomes.  By this definition, I have been quite insane for months.  If it is defined by a severing of perception and reality, again I fear the description is appropriate.  Visions and physical sensations of you taunt my days.  Even when I know with my whole intellect that you are not there, I still feel an anxiety from time to time as though I am about to round the corner and find you sitting there.  Sometimes, before switching on a light, I even brace myself to find you revealed by the light.

Another day, another string of disappointments.  I have only my memories.  I am told by well-meaning friends to forget, to eliminate reminders of you, and to move forward.  You exist in my life as but a memory, and to wipe it away would feel like an act of cruelty.  I could no sooner sever a limb than my memory of you.

I'm so sorry, my love.