None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom, the last.

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

We spent the spring together in our solitude, our uncertainty, our grief. The room was a crypt for the broken but still living, a printing press of sorts for the fabrications we spun for the outside world. The fibers of our being were embedded in book-spines and memories, in scar tissue and chips of glass along the floor. There were empty bottles and fraying bed sheets, shivering limbs and tired eyes. 

Survival is a savage sort of thing: it is always the rats that run first, the wretched who endure. I have never been the kind to die. I gnawed marrow from the bones of my sorrow, left claw marks in the concrete of the blind, listening walls. In the end, I was the one who endured.

Sometimes I still peruse the strange sinew of her desire, still run a cold finger across lines of early poetry, still hear her voice break across the underside of my mind. She was the most wonderful part of my salvaged world. How could she prove so absent, so mundane?

But the vitriol was imprecise and meaningless. There was nothing left to miss. I stopped wondering, and then it stopped mattering. Those lovely, strange, and sorrowful days, when the evenings wept and murmured into dawn, are gone now forever. I should not have loved him, or her, or them, whose worth was as that of a slowing pulse. I would have done better to love myself instead.

I exhale the recollections of that year like celestial dust. I am wading through the dark, still waters of quiet endurance, the faint dream of purpose. I am wonderfully alone amidst the tangle of lips and eyes, the trail of promises that longed to be broken, the shadow in the doorway when I turned, at last, to go.

To live is not an easy thing. To live in the state that I too often have is still more damning, more inane. I am a disconsolate aggregation of shrewd and disparate parts. I feel them in succession, like slow fragments of a suicide. Entropy. Apathy. Liquor. Coffee. Self-absorption. Bloodlust. Real lust. Sanctimony. Desolation. Defiance.

Yet, I am more than alive now. I am burning. I am striving. I am unafraid to be. The future unfurls without form or composition, an expanse of possible meaning, a darkness aching to be shaped into a world. Through the veil of a nascent conviction, I have learned, how to seek pleasures that are not penitential. Sometimes I still feel the dull pull of catastrophe, like a far-off cry from a forgotten life, but the inexorable present has already bled through whatever remains of the past. There is nothing left for me to fear. I love sparingly, I live viciously, I trust no one at all.

I once endeavored to tame my heart, but it does not know itself anymore. And so I suppose I am untethered at last, from the bonds of an earliest yearning. The best and the worst of my days are still to come. I live and dream by the rising of the moon. As its pallor wanes, I see shadows on the surface, and there lingers, in that dark brilliance, the final image of those I once loved. But they are fading now, dwindling slowly into nothing more than another set of bones to lay to rest beside the others. I was meant to survive this after all.