You never talk to me. I know, don’t really try and deny that. It’s just the way that we’ve been working together – or rather, each on their own – for quite a while. We had to do it. It’s as simple as that, I think. I cannot even begin to describe what I think is wrong with the two of us because I just do not really know where I should actually start from. It’s not something I can easily sum up in one monumental, hammer-to-the-face sentence, and neither is it something I know how to describe in clear and concise terms. Plainly put, I’m scared.

It’s just that... I’m utterly lost when alone, and alone’s all I’ve been the last handful of days I’ve spent in this hellhole of a crumbling nightmare. I don’t have the strength to do anything any more, barely even have any to breathe, and I’m breathing only because I am still so painfully hopeful and naïve and helpless and... This weird concoction of nauseating apathy and this utterly debilitating beast of a depressive mania, it’s proving far too sweet to resist being swallowed; tastes like memories that I feel I’ve blotted out of my head.

My fingertips still tingle whenever they brush up against the intricate, by now dusty woodwork of that beskulled ebony pipe you used to make sing for me whenever I thought I felt I was dying from the inside – do you remember that sorry old thing? I wipe at least thrice daily, I’m not too proud to admit. I don’t know what else to do except to purposelessly linger around in litter shed by the worn-down remains of what I liked to once call a life; and it was a life – or at least something that was as close to a life as my existence knew to be – that I full well knew was more than just merely livable. Now? Now I have nothing.

Well, to be honest, all I now have left are two boxes of rubble and a head bursting at its seams from being so debilitatingly overfilled with reminiscences as caustic as raw acid. Not the best parting gift I could’ve imagined, I could’ve been left with, but I’m glad I have that at the very least. It isn’t your fault. I cannot see how it could ever be something you could have brought upon either me or you, cannot bring myself to efface the pedestalised silvern image of you that I have here built up in the temple of my mind. Whichever way the events unfolded, I viscerally refuse to believe that you could have been at fault, and thus, I say, you aren’t. It’s, for me, a fact, and an undeniable core tenet to which I cling rabidly, a universal truth and law of reality. I’m still so numbeningly angry at both myself and at you. When you left, I crumbled up inside. Your absence gnew my soul for ages, gnew me from the inside until I accepted there wasn’t a thing to do that I could do any more. The finality of that one Saturday morning’s half hung-over realisation felt like a welcome sight for sore, thirsty eyes; trying to wash my sins and sorrows away, drown them in spirits, was all I could do to elope with my sanity from my own haunting spirits.