"I think of your smile; I'm in love with your teeth."
-Deer Tick
You don't exist in my reality anymore. You don't gleam in my awakening like you used to. You are undeniably absent in what is real.
But you are as existent as ever in my reverie. You are the thought I most enjoy, though the thoughts I lend your way don't bring me any pleasantries. Dismissing thoughts of you is a cognitive fight never more helplessly waged than now. More often than not I wave my feeble white flag of surrender, succumb to the masochism, and invite those thoughts in for tea to linger as long as they may. Because I would rather drown myself in a sea of thoughts for you than float along smoothly in an endless and meaningless undulation where you don't reside anymore.
I want to sink into the abyss that was Us. You made me feel flawless and wreckless; the only argument to ever get me to nearly abandon what I'd always protected so fervently. I almost discarded it - all of it - for the sake of ultimate proximity. Somehow, it seemed worth everything. Sacrificial, selfless, important. The brokenness you tried to hide was more compelling to me than any argument or justification you ever made for everything that was Us.
I miss you almost all the time. Especially in my lonely moments. I know we cannot be. I know in my core I don't want Us to be, either. But Reason never was a friend of mine. The emptiness I felt with you is better than the emptiness I feel now. I felt hollow when I was in Us. But, I craved you. That rough exterior canvasing your tender heart: It held me hostage. I've never in my life so willingly been held captive. You entered, and I was rescued. I exited, and I think we both broke a little. My existence is forever prevailed upon because of yours. But I'd rather live with the scar of your intrusion, than to have the immaculate facade that would have come from never encountering you.
There must be some perversity lurking within me, that I would rather ache for you than pray for numbness. I've never been one to abandon the weak parts of me, but this is so much more than that. It is deliberate susceptibility. I can still hear your cadences and see your unmistakable silhouette. I know them best in this dark place. I loved the space you took. That space is a ghost now.
If I am not meticulous with my thoughts, everything about Us pervades my bloodstream. Those cogitations are malignant, and yet, escape seems futile and even more poisonous than letting them invade my counscious vitality. You see, I abandoned Us because the possession terrified me. And even now, I have yet to find the solace that comes from turning one's back on perceived peril. Here I remain, a pitiful fragment of what I used to be- wanting to rewind and yet abhorring the past.
Sometimes I think I'd cash in all my chips for just one more complete surrender- just one more premeditated detraction. Because We are all that matters when the moment opportunes our collision. A collision- that is exactly what it is. A marvelous, ruinous escape into corrosive plains. It is beautifully destructive. Letting you be a part of me subtracts from my existence. And yet I ache for it. If, by some miraculous misfortune, you were to appear in my doorway, I would lack the strength to turn you away, though I know it would mean cancer for me. But in my deepest, most private places, I will wish for you and miss you and let you exist as you once did. And I will find no solace from that.
It is impossible to know you and not bleed for you. It is to feel tangibly what was once just an idea. I was always fighting for a cause which my deepest taverns of identity could not embrace. And it created a war within my own heart: every even beat for you, every odd beat in protest. If you only knew how perilously close you came to triumph.
All of our endless words. So many and each of them lost now, congregating somewhere in the expanses of time and space. What will become of them? Will they one day greet us and remind us of their existence? They will exclaim: "Welcome to Another Lifetime; We will make sense here. Here, we will provide the promise that was impossible There. Now, what was once a hopeless, debilitating fight, is now Meant. It is what was always supposed to be, here, in Another Lifetime."
Those words and affectations, exquisite and demoralizing, could hold no promise Here or Now, but were laced with the possibility of fruition in some other world. And they were the sweetest kind of poison.