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.
