First and Always

I've gone.

It's Tuesday night and I am at my mother's house. I am living in my old bedroom, only it's not my old bedroom anymore.

The last few days have been the worst in my life. If you have ever experienced death, especially a slow, painful death, you know about waiting, about watching, about time both blinking out and standing still. You know about wishing it was over. You know about hating yourself for those thoughts. You know about the wounds, the devastatingly irreversible pain. I wish for death.

I wish this was about death. Death is a reality. It is inevitable and somehow, in that, there is a fairness.

This is something so much worse. This I did myself. And I did it to someone else. And I have watched him cry, and I have seen his heart break in a way that has changed the very essence of who I am. I don't trust myself. I feel emptiness again. I feel the lack of wholeness I always suspected.

Tonight, when I finally fall into a coma of sleep, I will be alone, but it is when I think about him on the other side of that lonliness that I want to be dead. I can still feel him in my head and in my heart. I can still remember the way his shoulders felt, the temperature of his skin, his short hair against my lips when I kiss the back of his head; I can hear his breathing, feel him shifting his feet. But those will go. In time, it will all go and my memories will be nothing. It'll be like death.

And I asked myself over and over if change was a possibility. And I know that I want it to be. I want it. My heart is broken so small that I can't ever fix it.

I will sleep with his shirt under my pillow. I will sleep with his name on my tongue. I will hope that we look at the same stars and we see a destiny together.