You've returned to my nightmares, but these tears are not for you. Seeing the closed eyes of your corpse should have meant closure, should have meant that I could continue on, knowing that you're eternally out of my life. Why then can't I let you go?

But the tears are not for you. What if I were there, standing in front of your doorway, ringing the doorbell? What would I say? He opens the door, looks at me, asks, "Yes?" and I stand there, my chin trembling but unable to form a word as my hands convulse and shake. What could I say to him, even as I saw your ghost floating in the foyer? How could I stay the dagger from his throat... or mine?

No, they're not for you. As I try to imagine my life if you hadn't died, if I had stayed by your side and refused to let you go, I stare into the frightening abyss. There I am, at twenty nine, managing the one strand left of my sanity. No, I needed to let you die, and I cried for you then. Eventually the dreams faded, and I forgot you ever lived. I was free and almost happy. I allowed myself to believe that it was okay, that your death meant life for me.

So these tears are not for you. How did my path come so close once again to where it might have been? I shouldn't be able to see my choices, how things could have resolved. Why is it then that I stand on the ledge, a hundred feet above the gravelly old trail running beside the creek deep in the ravine? And why is it so hard to keep from jumping, from feeling the cold air prelude the sharp rocks and the splash of the water?

I wish these tears were for you, because then I could mourn you and grieve and wake up fresh and revitalized. But when I close my eyes tonight you will haunt my sleep, and I will be unable to forget your soft half-smile once again. It's a curse to have you giggle at me across the Styx as if to tell me that you told me so, that you told me all your life not to take things so seriously, not to care so much: it's only life after all.

These tears are for me, and they are only for me. When I open these groggy, crusty eyes and your image fades once again to mist, I face the true nightmare -- that you may be freely over there, but I'm stuck, lost and lonely, over here.

I wish you were a character I invented,
because then I could close the book
and go
to
sleep

In case you were wondering, my silence is not indicative of my thoughts. But what is there to say? These thoughts brew and bubble but nothing comes of them. Instead, midnight approaches and the lights dim as my eyelids fall. A night of restless sleep (and yes, sometimes dreams of you) and another day begins. My dear, it's not because I don't have time that I don't speak to you; it's simply that I don't have the words.

i'd hold a seance just to hang up on you

If there was a turning point in my life, it was that night.

It was one of my favorite memories, when I had favorites, when the past to me was a prophesy to the future and not the life of some fictional character, living in another world far from here. As the candlelight flickered off your eyelids, I spent that long lingering look upon your face marveling at it as one might wonder at the radiance of the sun. I've described the night with so many words now that it has become completely devoid of emotion. This is the tragedy of time, that descriptions of scenes as monumental as these can never carry with them the tumble of the heart, the stutter of the mind. But it is not upon that gaze that I wish to expound; doing so has done little to reveal the actual intention of that evening, or the actual consequence of it.

I could sense, even as I drowned in my own chemical ecstasy, that I was never going to feel that way again. I was at the peak of a curve, or perhaps as fate would find me, the trough. I was turning; the acceleration had finally reduced my velocity to zero, and I sat for one brief intentional moment in your presence, in that room, and I felt the world stop. I lied to you in that moment, brushing the hair back from your face and pretending that we could remain in that pause forever.

But it was a turning point, and we both knew it as we extinguished the candles one by one. My whole life before that night was spent dreaming of just one moment of tranquility, of knowing what true love meant.

And my whole life after that night was spent running from it.

A dark mist prevents me from seeing you, but I know you're gazing at me with those curious eyes again. You seem to insist, tonight as you always do, that I linger far too long here, standing in this wretched misery just because I find the glimmer of the brackish water beside my feet mysteriously enchanting. Yes, I admit that I come here to find you. I want you to set me straight, to push your hollow body through mine so I can feel the ethereal chill of the physically impossible but divinely required superposition of our souls.

Why do I continue to seek you out, and why do you mean so much to me? Why can't I ignore you, like everyone else seems so eager to do? Why can't I imagine you as a person? Why are you always a ghost, dead and inaccessible? I should be able to envision how you were: alive, vibrant, shimmering with the thousands of other souls I knew... but now you're something less than that... something less than real.

Were there any words I could have said to save your life? How could I have stopped this? Why can't you understand the guilt I feel, the overwhelming need I have just to be here, to try to find you once again?

No, there you are right in front of me, gliding back and forth, staring at me but hidden, veiled in your precious mist.

I can't explain how strange it is to see your face, to hear your voice. You died nine years ago, maybe ten now. How then do I feel this flood of emotion when you laugh, when you swear off the cuff in videos I was never meant to see? How can I explain the way your quirky tongue turning a phrase in a flat, two-dimensional mirage fills me with inexplicable desire to reach into the screen, grab ahold of your locks of hair, pretend that you really are alive and that all of these breaths you're taking are real; that all of the syllables you form with your precious, perfect lips are not simply voyeuristic fantasies of your afterlife -- or mine?

I'm forming my thoughts carefully, dreaming that I might get one more chance to talk to you, to tell you everything you (could have?) meant to me, but it's a fantasy I'll never realize. It's just enough to make my heart sink every time I pick up the pen and try to write about the intimacy we never shared, shouldn't have shared, needed to share; how I try to tell you the future I saw apart from you in your eyes; how I try to ask for your forgiveness for being nothing by trying to be everything to you. As I watched the photons dancing before my eyes, all I could think was how foolish I was to ever believe that this terrible pen could produce the eulogy to do justice to your memory.

Fred Rogers reminded me today about hard work and discipline:

"I like to swim, but there are some days I just don't feel much like doing it -- but I do it anyway! I know it's good for me and I promised myself I'd do it every day, and I like to keep my promises. That's one of my disciplines. And it's a good feeling after you've tried and done something well. Inside you think, "I've kept at this and I've really learned it -- not by magic, but by my own work." (The World According to Mister Rogers: Important things to remember, page 105)

There are many days on which I need to read that.

Pound on the walls all you want. On this day more than any other, there is no way out.

The past is as real to me as the present is, as I sit and read the nine-year-old words you wrote. I wanted to hate you after reading them, but I was the one who was aloof, distant. Your heart was in the right place, even if you were never able to act the part. When you sat, reading my story by the light of your candles and in front of a recording of David Bowie, did you imagine that you and I were the characters? You must have, and you must have known how deeply I was changed that night when I brushed your hair softly with my finger and watched you sleep. I imagined all these years that I felt what I felt alone, but maybe I didn't.

I thought I had discarded the emails your ex-boyfriend had written me, long after he was your boyfriend. He signed his emails "agape" even when I lashed against him in my proto-agnostic rage, and I resented myself when he died for never taking him up on his offer of coffee. It wasn't necessary; when we sailed on that boat on the Ohio River, we talked and sang enough for our entire lives. I can imagine him living in Missouri right now, preaching in a tiny church in a needy town. How could I really feel his death? Ten years on, I knew we'd have never said another word anyway. His death was immediate, when he boarded his bus and I boarded mine as we poured out of the convention hall that cold February afternoon. Everything I heard from him after that was from beyond the grave.

You asked how he and I had "clicked." It surprised you, shocked you to know that we had something to talk about. Who had we each become to you? I glaze over, reading emails that were written from your heart but clearly not to me. Who were you writing to? Were you writing to Daniel? It's my address in the "To:" line, but you never told me you loved me and here were words so sweet, words that ended with a declaration of love. Did you expect somehow you'd get us both?

I know where you live now. I'm embarrassed to admit that, but Daniel told me. He wants to take a train and he wants to find you. I keep telling him you're dead but he won't listen. He insists I send you a postcard, at least. Just one, he says, from Baltimore. How am I supposed to explain to him that he's reading the past, that you're not alive anymore? How can I convince him that when he reads, "i like getting mail and i think my favorite type of mail is postcards and i think my favorite person to receive postcards from is you," that he's reading what was, not what is?

How can I ever convince him that even if he sent you a thousand postcards, you'd never respond?

I wait for you behind your moments of greatest confidence. I stand beside you when you sleep. Every breath that slides triumphantly out of your mouth feeds me, makes me stronger. I feel your muscles strengthen, your pride grow. And I sit, patiently waiting for you.

Where was I when you stumbled? Where was I when you cried? In your deepest dreams I shatter your illusions; in your finest hour I sound the horn. And yet never have you heard my call; my silence is deafening. You never know where I am.

Oh how your blood tastes! The twisted agony on your face, deformed and raw. Yes, it is my eyes you see in the shadows, fading behind the powerful veil of darkness that shrouds me. But you will never reach me, never touch me. You lash out at me with your strength, with your brilliance, and yet you never snare me. Where am I now? Have you the wisdom to capture me? No, you stand with your head raised to the sky wallowing in your greedy narcissism. What a fool you are, my captain.

I am waiting for you.

When you walked away, I thought of a hundred reasons to yell at you.

I stared after you, the fear and rage boiling to the surface of my consciousness, not because you ever offended me or trespassed on my implicit trust of you, but rather because I needed to feel something, and when you walked away, hatred was easier.

I wasn't mad at you for leaving. It was exactly what you should have done; maybe even what I would have done had our roles been reversed. But watching your long red hair swish back and forth so impersonally infuriated my sensibilities. Who gave you permission to be so damned beautiful?

When you walked away, I spat on the ground. I know that makes you think I'm sick, that I'm somehow unrefined, like a thug or a tramp, but it's the truth. I spat when you left because I was so angry, so tired of this petty godless sensibility that condemns me to have ever met you.

I thought of a hundred reasons to yell at you; I hated that smug lilt as you spoke, that cold grin as you gazed out from behind your spectacles, that vacant anger in your eyes as we made love. I hated that you could never boil an egg without breaking it, that you never hung your coat when you walked in the door, that you always spoke of yourself with a pompous air that suffocated everyone in the room. I hated everything about you, and I wanted to yell every single one of them into your arrogant little face, but I just stood, sputtered, stammered, and barely managed to spit.

When you walked away, I stared after you. I couldn't accept that you had left, that you would ever leave. I wanted things to be different; I knew they could never be different. It was my curse, my lot, to make you leave, to send you away. Beauty like yours could only damn me.

I wasn't mad at you for leaving. I was mad at myself. I spat on the ground, swearing and kicking. You just walked away; how could I blame you, after all? How were you to know how much I'd fear you, how I'd turn away and let you leave?

I stared after you, dreadfully wishing I hadn't been longing for you. I wanted to yell at you to come back, to meet me, to please just once acknowledge me. I wanted to tell you the hundred things I wanted to hate you for. I loved you not because you ever spoke to me or supported my implicit trust of you, but because I needed to feel something as we passed, as you walked your way and I walked mine - surrounded in a city of a million other people. I needed to feel something for you, and for you alone.

When you walked away, I spat on the ground. I thought of the hundred reasons I had to yell at you, and how I didn't even want to know your name.

I do not take credit for this; it is merely a retelling of a very old story. For example, see this version .

A woman sat by the bedside of her husband, who lay dying. He was a jealous man, who had always loved his wife like no other man had, and who always believed no other man was capable of such love. As his heart slowed and his breathing became erratic, he took her hand. "Please promise me, my dear woman, that you will never love another man. For I know the hearts of men, and none will ever love you as I have, and you will only ever be hurt."

The woman promised, tearfully, as he slipped from this world.

For many months, the woman kept her promise, until one day she met a charming man. This new man treated her kindly and adored her, and she slowly began falling in love with him. However, when she prepared for sleep at night, she would be visited by the ghostly visage of her husband, coming back to remind her that this man was just going to hurt her, that he was incapable of loving her as she deserved.

For many weeks this continued. The ghost was a strange and clever one, for he was capable of extracting minutia from her day's conversations and using those points against her. He was also able to describe in detail precisely the gifts the woman and new man exchanged or the embraces they shared.

Soon, the woman was at the brink of insanity thanks to the ghost. She loved this new man, but she was unable to move beyond this horrible visitor at night. Seeking advice, she asked a holy woman what she could do. "Simply take a handful of rice," she said, "and offer it to him."

That night, the ghost appeared again. And, just as before, he began telling her of that day's events - including the visit to the holy woman. "So you know," the woman began, "I must offer you this rice."

"I don't see how this matters," the ghost replied.

"I will promise to leave this man, to remain single the rest of my life, dressed in black and worshiping your memory, if you will only answer me one question."

Being a wise but selfish ghost, it was more than willing. "Ask me, dear wife."

"How many grains of rice are in my hand?"

At these words, the ghost vanished and was never heard from again.