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.