It feels like sacrilege to call you darling. I feel very differently from the way I felt last night, but that sentiment remains the same. I forget you completely between these spurts of regret and longing, when we’re sitting side by side on the couch, miles away from one another, watching the thing that was once our love whine and die. I hate myself for allowing these past months to taint my porcelain-delicate memories of you and what we’ve shared for the past three years.

The only thing, the only thing I want in this world is you, not as you are now- cold, hard, resentful- but as you were before, as we were before, when we ran to the world bravely, unafraid, so deeply, fervently, madly in love that my body aches to think about it.

Like clockwork I wake at eight in the morning, dry mouthed but not hung over. I sit on a stranger’s couch, a copy of a copy of a copy, a reiteration so distant that I have begun to fade and lose all distinction; once a possessor of an object so impassioned, so lucid that it vividly cuts into my mind like a scalpel into unblemished skin, now a reason for passersby to snicker with shrewd assumption: a stained shirt, smeared eye liner, half a bottle of rum.

Here, on a small couch in a vaguely familiar apartment, is where I grieve for you. I am alone; I will always be alone when I allow myself to feel this way. I am sorry I cannot do this in front of you. I mourn for you the way a mother mourns a son, a sister a brother, a fan a hero. We can never go back, I’m afraid, to the luscious delirium of yesteryears, the intoxicated fantasy of new love that we managed to suspend for three years. We can never love each other again without the stinging memory of this January’s cruelty and the things we have done. Already our love begins to slip out of focus and become a mirage-like haze down the road. The girls chat up their scandal at hand while I, deaf to their prattle, long for the original other. Masochistically my mind will float to you in the years to come; a soft breeze will blow on my face some sunny afternoon, and I will remember singing loudly to David Bowie while on our way down to North Carolina in a rented car, Bavarian bagels at servattii in the chill of early morning, moon pies brought home to me after a bad day, notes left on a studio desk, a man who cared, a man who loved, a man with the capacity to comfort, protect, hurt and torture me,
a man gone far, far and forever away.