The wake

Music: Saturnus, "Martyre".

It's hard to admit you managed to make me cry again. I never thought you'd be able to do that. Not after all this time. I had raised my walls and put up my defenses; I had locked my inner being away. I had "buried my heart under the snow." I had done everything and yet found it you did, like the blind man who stumbles upon the proverbial pearl by mistake.

I went home, sat on my bed and let the night sink in. Seconds later I was crying. Just like that. The one moment I was thinking and the next overwhelmed. All I could do was let it out. The instinctive wisdom of a drowning man.

Don't get me wrong. It isn't hard to for me to start crying lately. Quite the contrary, actually, as I'm more fragile than ever. I just didn't think I'd cry again because of you. I thought myself dead over this matter. "Comfortably numb." However life loves to prove us wrong. It would have been even encouraging, in some sense, if it wasn't so utterly devastating. The one moment there was ground under my feet and the next there wasn't. Just like that, really.

We create mental images of people in our minds and when we run away from them we start living with the image and not the person anymore. We unwittingly create our own tormentor and feed him or her on a daily basis with all the "what if", the frustration, the anger, the guilt. The more time passes, the more this imaginary person gets out of touch with reality and the person it was based on, till we end up harbouring a ghost and living with this creation in the past, dwelling in our misconceptions and mistakes. And one day we meet the real person once more and that ghost vanishes, leaving us to rediscover the other in flesh and blood.

What hurt me the most, my dear, was not the lover I lost, for our relationship was a failure in every aspect you care to name. For me giving is the most natural thing in the world, while you were incapable of taking. Some people even said that you were a bit jealous of me in some sense, that I was too much for you. I'll never know and it doesn't really matter. That night I did not cry for the lover I had lost years ago for it seems you were never there to begin with. Therefore I never actually had you in order to lose you. Maybe the timing was wrong, or maybe we were not cut for each other. I will not allow myself to reconsider the whole matter from that aspect, because I had done this countless nights and it led me nowhere save for the darkest pits of despair. No, for whatever the reason, it was not meant to be. What I lamented for was entirely different. I did not mourn for the kind of relationship we had and neither for wanting us to be lovers again. We are incapable of being together; incompatible, for some reason. What I cried for was that for one more time I realised what I had loved in you: your intelligence, your wit and humor. You had made me laugh countless times (and I am as easily provoked to laugh as I am to cry) and that night you did so again. And it all came crashing down, and then the bottom fell out.

It just broke my heart to realise, my dear, how little time we have at our disposal before I leave again. I cried because you are not going to keep in contact -you did not do that even when we were a couple- and I will miss you. I will miss you more than words can say. But some things are not meant to be, some people are not meant to be together either as lovers, friends, or anything, really, and that's that. "There is no time for us, there is no place for us." I cried because everything and everybody that I hold dear is always snatched away and removed from my life, be it a person, a favourite pastime like role playing games or anything, and those that stay are usually changed beyond recognition or had never been what or whom I thought they were. And I am left in the company of books and comics and CDs and my imaginary heroes and heroines. Don't get me wrong, I am more than honoured to be their focal point of existence, but from time to time it is just not enough. It cannot keep my sanity intact.

Some people might say that it would have been good for me if I fell in love again -it has been a very long tome since the last time- but I know that nothing good is ever going to come out of it. Wisdom-wise, I can certainly be taught a lot of things by it. But happiness-wise, not a hope in hell.

PS: The title refers to the tenth graphic novel of the 'Sandman' comic series. For some reason (obviously because Mr. Neil Gaiman is such an excellent writer) the very essence of how I felt was perfectly captured and depicted in that volume. And what better proof there is of an artist's skill that seeing one's personal experiences clearly, almost blatantly reflected in a strangers' work?