What greater grief is there than to be left on earth without experiencing life with you?

It’s that hollow feeling where you can sense an ultimate void, the terrifying nothingness within your core. It's the quiet, dark section of your psyche where no light can penetrate, where no hope, poem, or love can fill this endless expanse of darkness. It’s not the feelings that kill but the absence of them. That empty space devoid of any human experience, a void that no amount of love or laughter can ever fill. We find ourselves on the very edge, always running, running, running, so the hole doesn’t consume us. It’s the inability to express, the lack of physical ability to crash, to explode, to expand into thin air.

We become shadows of ourselves, memories of light. Partially here, but mostly living in a lie within our own heads. I’m you tonight, and I cried in agony like a six-year-old, feeling left alone again. I punched the walls like I was twelve, reliving the pain from my mother’s hurtful words. It’s a pain within me I couldn’t comprehend, a missing piece, a perception of not being worthy of motherly love and the familiar fatherly anger. I cry for you, for your pain and mine, for the unfairness of life and how complicated and painfully heartbreaking it can be.

Our story was written perfectly, almost like fiction, like a movie, a story of my dreams and yours. I believed in love, I believed in you, in us, in a future together. My heart almost exploded as we blended into one in a soul-like connection. I loved you so deeply, and you loved me in your own way. But as perfect as it seemed, life exists between infinite possibilities. All beauty has an ugly side, and all love can harbor anger. I couldn’t reach you with my words, and you couldn’t reach me with your touch. I screamed, you attacked, and it was an ugly scene. We turned into monsters without a cage, a fitting punishment for both of us—to want something so badly, to hold it, to bite it with your teeth, and to know deep within that you will never, ever deserve it.

And here we are, clutching our chests and whimpering like wounded dogs, choking for air, rotting in our heads forever. The big childhood house is our first grave, a belief that some people are like constellations, touching the earth only for a season. You are half of my whole soul, and what greater grief is there than to be left on earth without experiencing it with you? We walk endlessly among the ruins we made, half people, hurt and drained, our hearts littered with the ruins of a love that once believed it was eternal.

You showed me your damaged soul, and in return, you pretended I had none.