IT has come time to take notice of a beauty that is not seen but is felt. It is seen and it is beautiful, but the feeling that I receive as I feel it is more meaningful than anything any God could ever offer me. It is amazement and it is wonder, the splendor of innocence and of the soul. The beauty extends to all areas of her being and leaves the word ‘beauty,’ as well as all of its adjective cousins, feeling pitiful. There is very little that can describe, much less encompass, the awe-inspiring and far-reaching female beauty that comes directly out of the woman that has captured my heart and blessed my soul. ‘Beauty’ is a word I wish not to use – but when you are speaking of an indefinable aura that is more beautiful than life to be a part of – what other word shall be chosen?

     I cannot choose; I can only choose to let the words choose themselves, as I chose to be chosen. I find her smile towards my brow to be magical, but her kiss to my eyes saddening, because the lips will eventually fade away and the lord will eventually back down and deny me what was never mine. Fade away and fade into a serenity that I miss but hope to reclaim, if not through the brow then through different avenues, different times, and different beauty. But hope has no hope but to be replaced by despair and longing.

     This picture of sentiment has grayed into a hue of almost unrecognizable distortion, but it is still the brightest illustration of love that has ever existed. Faded, blurred, and almost non-existent, it remains the closest thing to divinity that I know of.

     I long for her and yet I do not want to know where she is. I need to kiss her but I am afraid to see her disappointed face. I yearn for her touch but am frightened to death of her scorn. The immeasurable amount that quantifies the love I have for her may only possibly be mirrored by the steady reaction of disgust that comes over her face every time she is witness to my soul in her presence. It is ugly and it is cursed, and it is damaged beyond all reconcilable control.

     No one could guess what I have done, though most would assume I did nothing wrong at all – my how wrong they would be. How wrong I am and how wrong I was – jilted desires and selfish devotion, not to her but to myself. Throw away love affair that was not meant to be thrown away – and one month after the demise, one year after the beginning of the demise, and over two years after our meeting, I am finally made to regret what I destroyed so subtly. I was a victim, as was she, to my subtle and continuous desire to destroy everything that life holds good and true, and beauty had nothing to do with it. Beauty had nothing to do with life, not even to our life, because I came to behave as if beauty and life were fictitious words created by someone other than our creator. The Great Creator created, and I in turn rejected his proposals. He was good to me, as was she, and the only person I can imagine who was not good to me was myself.

     Who is the Great Creator? Is it a he or a she? Is it a faceless and sexless being of contortionist proportions feeling out humanity and pulsating on its every heartbeat? Is the Creator a Jew or a Christian or an Atheist? Is the Creator a creator or a misunderstood scientist playing with fire in an undisclosed lab deep within the merry confines of our singular minds? Did we create the Creator? Did the Creator create science? Or did scientists create the Creator? Is science an abstract of the Creator’s humor – playing along and pretending to give answers while secretly hiding the truth all the while? Did science create love or is love an offshoot of the Creator’s tears? Tears of joy and tears of solitude and loneliness and tears of beauty and tears and sweating kindness of the soul – bleeding kindness of the soul so much so that the bleeding of the Creator has caused me to bleed internally for the one soul that I deemed to be more beautiful than anything the Creator or anyone else could possibly introduce me to.

     It was not the Creator at all – it was me.

     The Creator is nothing more than an abstract of art, physics, science, love, evolution, humanity, desolation, respect, hope, fear, despair, insanity, religion, and dictionaries. There is no Creator no more than there is a you, or than there is a me. There is no me because I pretend that I don’t exist, at least now that I don’t have her – and where she has gone is something that I do not want to learn. I do not want to know why she abandoned me (though I already know why). I do not want to know why she left our love in a puddle of tears (though I know she had no choice). I do not want to know and still I search, all the while dodging the truth.

     The truth is that I cannot stop searching, though I might try, and I might die trying. Instigation only causes more loneliness, at least when I instigate a conversation with her. When I instigate a conversation with myself it causes even more despair and desperate feelings of horrible, horrible loneliness. I know what happened, but I cannot bring myself to admit it, which generates an unfavorable twinge of hurt into my heart that beats over and over again faster than a speeding bullet that I wish was in my heart so my heart would not beat at all – not at all. Slow times and fast times and all times move at the same pace – pacing themselves gently for the end of the end, for the beginning of the end was over long ago. I did not brace myself for any end, and I knew there were no means that would justify the ends, and any brace I gave for myself only would have facilitated the end, for it would have been admitting an end in sight, a long time coming of wits unable to keep each other happy any longer – not even for a second.

     Where is the bullet that enters my heart gingerly and plays in my inner tissues and cuts through it like a knife at two hundred miles per hour – dancing in my heart and piercing my skin and my livelihood? Where is it and where is that feeling of suicidal good? Why shall I sit forever in health when all I need is closure – which can only mean death? Why do I miss death even when I have never met it, never stared it in the face, and never played with it on a lonely beach somewhere in the south of Spain just past March when the spring nights turn to April? Does it disappear? Does death disappear as love does and beauty does and youth does? Does my youth even exist or has it already ended and I cannot, will not, admit it? Where is that bullet that enters my heart and why has it not entered already and cut my blood into one billion particles while solidifying my soul? The answer is clear: it has already arrived.

     It arrived long weeks ago in summer drowning July with sun beating down on sweaty brows and porcelain beauties that I would not, indeed could not, condone. Sitting smiling and hoping for a revival while succumbing unwillingly to a requiem, a requiem for a dream lost and destroyed. Destruction seeped into my mind like a worm or a blood-sucking leech feeding off my brain and stealing half of my heart’s beats – or maybe that was reality. Penetrating deep into every pore was the undeniable breath of panting reality. Panting – panting and breathing deeply and sucking the life out of me rapidly and quickly and with no remorse – reality has no remorse and leaves no corpse. Reality hits and does not offer the pleasure of death. Death is too easy and life is not much more inviting in the grand scheme of the Creator that we all created and who does not exist save in the minds of those who wish to believe in existence. I believe in existence because I felt it and it was there in all its summer glory along with its cousin reality, blaming me for being alive while I blamed them for me not being dead. Sitting across from me was again an orchid of the spring summer blossom of the soul, an outreach of whichever soul created beauty, flower of soft divinity and delicate wonder, springtime wonder and glorious aura – all her – all there.

     And in front of me is the definition of beauty as defined by the Creator, and if I were the Creator I would define beauty as such, as the woman sitting in front of me, and I am the Creator and there she is – I wish I could create something so pure, so real, and so shockingly lovely.

     She is sitting across from me and I am ignoring everything about her.

     I am ignoring her life and her love, her soul and her heart. I am ignoring what she means to me and I am ignoring what I mean to her. I am ignoring her. I am ignoring reality and I am ignoring the future, and I am ignoring the past. I am ignoring what drives my happiness and I am ignoring what will inevitably make me sad, depressed, and lonely. I am ignoring the beat of human life and disrespecting the protocol of love. I should have been playing with her and I should have been playing with myself, but I should not have been playing with our love for each other. I was playing with our love for each other and I had no idea how to stop. She was sitting across from me and I saw Venus and I saw the most beautiful girl I had ever seen and still I saw nothing. I was blind and there was no cure for stupidity. Stupidity reeks and spreads like cancer through every cell in my body despite all modern medicines that scientists from way yonder created like love, respect, happiness, and falling deeply into love. Love meant nothing to me unless it included myself, and I didn’t even know it. I could never possibly even imagine touching another woman, but I could fall in love with myself and ignore her needs while playfully pretending to be satisfying those needs that find themselves eating away at her desire to be in any relationship with he who played with needs as if they were on fire or insignificant. It was not sexual needs but it was certainly the need to feel loved, to feel special, and to feel wanted – to feel madly in love – and words do not do this need justice. Words conjure up a false front of emotion, even if that false front describes a torrent of emotion and a mountain of expressive love – you see, words do not care, nor do they make one feel cared for.

     She was sitting across from me and I looked at her with faint hope that was glimmering sadly over an ocean that had never been sailed. I fought the current bravely, but it was sad, transparent, and downright pitiful to swim so frantically across a sea that should have been calm and should have had a desert horizon somewhere, somewhere in sight. Nothing was in sight and I found it difficult to look into her deep, blue-green eyes without bringing tears from the Creator onto the table of the café where we sat and contemplated why the Creator ever introduced us.

     She was sitting across from me and I could no longer deny her incredible beauty. I had spent the better part of two years (unbeknownst to me) denying her beauty, and now I was through with the denial of both beauty and love – of course now it was too late. It’s never too late but it’s too late now. The sun beats down on my fading frown. I step in the easy and the easy wins – and she just sits there with an evil grin. Longing, longing, longing for understanding but once I understand I become violently and uncontrollably angry and upset and, later, drunk.

     No one ever wanted to understand, including me. Ignoring reality is more bearable to the soul than recognizing it, and once recognition sets in, ignorance quickly becomes bliss, and knowledge the enemy. I was absolutely destroying myself – destroying my life and happy to do so and unhappy to see her sitting across from me, calling me on it.

     Why was I unhappy? Actually we were walking when realization set in, when reality beat me down, curb is where I stood, blatantly shocked, speechless, and unable to redeem myself. In my mind I still stand there, frozen, on Seventh Avenue where the blend of fascination and hurt leave me dumbstruck. Yes I still stand there and have no idea how to move – feet stuck in cement or pavement and burning tar burning my insides and my heartburn is mental and my mentality is burned. Pavement, searing and soaring winds gush with blood that I am bleeding through my pores in a terrible pool of horrible sweat. She stares at me in disgust and her eyes bulge in evil, twisted harmony with the world that she is now joining as she is leaving me. She finds an exit sign from my world and happily pulls, pulls away into the oasis of my absence

     Ah the beautiful world that does not involve me. It is frightening at first, but once she had a taste of it, once she had a taste of the sweet nectar of my invisibility, she could not resist continuing the separation that may have been, could have been mended like fences echoing in a dying and voiceless wind. She was gone, standing in front of me on Seventh Avenue, lifeless and gone – and happy – contented to be free. She was lifeless in my eyes because she was no longer breathing into my soul with a tight tenderness that was both amorous and adoring. She had the distinct pleasure of ignoring my soul, for my soul was tainted and she was finally able to look directly past its false charm and conniving nature.

     She found the world to be more beautiful at that moment, that moment on Seventh Avenue, as her heart was no longer connected to mine by an invisible string of attachment and love. My heavy and depressed heart would no longer be with her when she left my pathetic presence, and she would be, indeed she was, free. When she was out and a beautiful young man was making a pass at her, I was no longer there in her mind asking her what the hell she was doing. When she smelled the flowers in a garden of divinity, I was no longer there looking at her as if she were a loon. If she smiled at life, I was not there to wonder why. If she smiled at a little child’s small steps, I was not there to ruin her joy with a smirk. The string was gone and we were alone, but she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t alone and she was one with her life instead of being one with my heart. She wasn’t alone and she played with happiness and the simple pleasures rather than the negativity and skeptical nature of my being.

     And I was alone – more and more depressed and manic phases of drunken lunacy with new girls to replace the lost splendor of her beauty, new girls here and there and manic me with manic smiles and manic, fake happiness to go along with manic, ridiculous proclamations of my newfound devotion to life. My newfound devotion was instead to the brooding, terrible enclosing of my soul within a shell created when I lost my heart’s lifeline, my string, my connection to her soul.

     What she did not realize, unmistakably, is that as she left she did not break the string that connected our hearts, but instead broke my heart on the pavement as it erupted out of my chest and began pounding on the sidewalk behind her. She brought my heart with her and still has it, wherever she is, and the only reason it doesn’t weigh her down or bring her down is because she does not realize that she has it. I am afraid to tell her and I am afraid to talk to her because I am afraid of her scorn and of her look of disgust and of sweating blood on Seventh Avenue. I do not want to tell her because I am afraid she will then cut the string and all connections and then not only will I not have my heart, but she won’t have it either.

     I fear life and sometimes I wonder why it is important to live. I find it fascinating that scientists put so much stress on, and effort into, keeping people alive when in reality nobody knows how death may be in comparison to life. I fear reality because I’m not sure that what I see is real – and therefore it scares me – like a ghost might scare a little child. Reality is a ghost and life is a veil of secrecy and my girlfriend has my heart tugging behind her on a string and she doesn’t even know it.

     Bounce, bounce, bounce, SMACK goes my heart on the pavement and bang, bang, BANG it goes up the stairs to her apartment where she sleeps but no longer invites me to sleep with her. My heart has no eyes so it cannot see whom she is sleeping with and my heart is quite happy to be blind as a bat. My heart was blind, in fact, all the while, and blindly fell in love with her before it even knew what was happening – my heart was beating so fast that I could not keep up with the whirlwind pace of those first few frenetic days, two years ago, when I met her.

     I don’t remember what happened because I have blocked it out. I DO remember what happened but do not want to talk about it because I am TRYING to block it out and will die trying and then be satisfied that I found death and was able to dodge life. I do not believe in suicide and scorn those who do. Natural death comes easily enough and should not be cheated. I am quite sure she thought that I cheated life and indeed cheated myself of the greater pleasures of life and she was right. I cheated myself out of the grandest pleasure of life – her.

     THE narrow corner of the narrowest part of her upper right eyelid was cut slightly and I wanted to know why. The upper portion of her left bicep was scarred slightly in a way that seemed to have been painful and I wanted to know why. Her legs were like slimly and shapely chiseled rocks, her breasts firm as small but curvaceous melons, and her arms more muscular than mine, and I wanted to know why. I felt like a little child, and I wanted to know why, why, why! Giddy expectations and great misstatements and broad generalizations and seconds later I knew nothing new, nothing greater, nothing broader – and still I was giddy. I had too much to learn and too much knowledge to gain. There was an infinite amount of information to be processed when it came to the moment that I met her, and I was tireless in my pursuit of not only her, but of her secrets, of her beauty, and of the soft touch of her hands. I was not to be fatigued when it came to the explanation of her mind and of her secrets, of her body and of her nakedness, truly of her rosy cheeks and cavernous smile. I found no fact too trivial, no anecdote or tale too meaningless, and no deep secret too tedious to pursue with passion and immense emotion and interest. There was no part of her body, no part of her ankle, leg, skin, stomach (oh heavenly stomach), knee, arm, elbow, neck (oh soft and smooth neck!), cheek, too insignificant to explore, examine, and kiss. My interest in her was infinite, and there was a never-ending amount of new information to be learned, a limitless number of new places on her body to kiss and play with, and indeed a playful exuberance that came from every new tidbit of information that would allow me to near the essence of her soul and the core of her beauty.

     But infinity faded, and longing dissipated, as the months turned into years, and the excitement shockingly was transforming itself into boredom. There were new frontiers to be explored, but exploration had become tedious as discoveries grew rarer, and the difficulty in accepting the greatness of previous discoveries, indeed in rediscovering them over and over and over again, was, unfortunately, too much to overcome. It should not have been too much to overcome, at least for any sane man with any sane sexual drive and any sane desire to live a happy life with a beautiful woman, at least for any sane man who wanted to live – to live. The dancing inferno of heaven was transpiring into a freezing wasteland of hellish repetitiveness. There was nothing that could be done about it - save what could be done about it. There was a lot that could be done about it, but in this world relationships take two willing partners and two interested souls. I was no longer willing nor interested in discovering or rediscovering, I simply wanted to hold onto the dying status-quo, which was dying and then dead, and which was stagnant and then boring, so much so that someone had to be man or woman enough to admit that nothing is going anywhere at any time in a relationship that does not progress forward or at least regress to its moments of greatness.

     Her eyes were like emeralds or gems and glittered in the light and glittered in the darkness when she looked up at me while making love or down at me while making love and the light was divine and good. I met her and was immediately attached to her and the only place we could take a step back to, should anything go wrong, was to nothingness. And so I would no longer be able to see her darting and loving blue-green eyes – wondrous eyes of shocking beauty and windows to a deceptive heart. She smiled and her eyes lit up and she frowned and her eyes drooped down. Her eyes were the keys to not only her existence, but to my existence as well. I felt existence to be good, life to be good, and my soul to be comfortable and in splendid health when she smiled and her eyes glimmered with the strength of stars six billion light years away. I find it difficult to ignore her eyes these days - even though I no longer see them, and even though I no longer stare at them longingly - as they appear in my dreams and appear in front of me when I am driving down a road that I should not be driving down in a life that I should not be living. I see her eyes in dreams and they speak to me as she used to speak to me. They are loving and they are condescending and they are truthful and they are right. I want to listen but I am blind. I want to see what her eyes tell me but I am deaf. I have always been blind and deaf, and since the first moment I met her I have never been able to listen or see.

     But what made her eyes more powerful, especially that first afternoon I met her and the first night I spent an extended amount of time with her, as well as the months immediately following said afternoon and night, was her eyes’ accomplice – her body. Her body melted into mine and made me feel one with another soul, another person, for the first time in my life. I was comfortable with myself, again, for the first time in my life, because I had found somebody else who fit so perfectly into my line of existence. She was there because she was me, an extension of me, a guardian angel who made love to me and fit me with an amazing and beautiful body that could smile at me with affection and love without smiling or speaking a loving word of affection. With one touch, with one act of love, with one hug, with one psychical connection, whether it be of making love or touching hands or lips or cheeks or full naked bodies in spooning love of blatant respect and amazing motionless embrace embodied souls one with each other and I knew what the word love meant and what it was to be loved. Naked embraces were enough to teach me all there was to know about love, and this girl, three years my junior and a thousand years wiser, was my professor.

     "You have no idea how much I love you," she told me a week after we met.

     And she was right, I had no idea how much she loved me. I doubted that she would ever love me at all. I could not understand why anybody that I loved would actually love me – so I doubted that love immediately, no doubt leaving me severely distrusting every aspect of our relationship for the remainder of its existence. Which, should one think about it, would obviously offer up the possibility of an unknowing sabotage occurring later on – perhaps two years later.

     "You’re right," I replied.

     I had no idea how much she loved me and I wanted to know.

     "How much do you love me?" I continued.

     I wanted love to be everlasting and I wanted to feel loved forever. I hated relationships because they always entailed the possibility of an ending that was either premeditated or destined to occur. Why could we not decide when we met that we were going to be together forever and leave it at that? This is what we did – and still we have since split. We split and now I have no idea why we got together in the first place. If we were eventually to split, why get together at all? Why date when the dating will eventually end? Why live when death will eventually overcome life? Standing and sitting are really similar motions as they are both motionless acts of life, even if moving is involved. I sit and then I stand and both times she is not in front of me, though her eyes still dart around and lecture me. Why did her eyes ever lecture me in the first place? Why did she agree to date me when she knew it would eventually end? Did she love me? Strange creations of relations that will eventually fail fall down in my heart as I sit and stand at once looking into the eyes that never wanted to be beholding me and never even found it within their hearts to play catch with my soul and have fun and relax and find truth rather than entering into a relationship that would eventually end and be doomed and fall down like my heart on a pavement that cannot see. Splendid magnificence on her part did not prove that she loved me. All love ends – or so I have come to believe. Bargaining over relationships is an idiotic occupation – this is how I live. If the love were to end, why did it ever begin? Why does continuity mean so little in this life? Does it mean more in death? Did she love me? How much?

     "I love you more than all the others." She told me, smiling, radiant, and obscenely beautiful – sitting there and wondering whether or not importance was important anymore.

     I had forgotten about all the others the minute that I saw her and her eyes and her body and heard her voice and smoked a cigarette with her on a ferry that should never have docked. I had forgotten about all the others because they no longer existed. There were others but I could not point them out in a crowd and I did not talk to them and I did not think about them. They disappeared the moment that I touched her lips with mine in the basement of longing, longing, longing for forever and for life.

     I had forgotten about the others because they were insignificant in comparison to her and her flowing blonde hair and radical blue-green eyes. She stood and sat five foot nine inches - exactly my height. Her eyes were right in front of me and how was I to remember who the others were? I had forgotten about the others because they were insignificant and they were rotten and they never loved me anyway. She never loved me, though she said she did, and she probably did at one point though it faded as I failed to rediscover what it was to be in love with her.

     "What others?" I asked innocently.

     "Now you’re pretending to forget them?"

     "Yes."

     But I wasn’t pretending and I found it difficult to remember the previous loves that had penetrated so deeply into my heart and left me floundering on the edge of sanity and eventually pushed me into floating insanity. You never know what you have until it’s gone and I had no idea what I had at any point in any moment that might be defined as this life that I might possibly live. Every life that I live will involve multiple girlfriends and I will always forget the last when someone new comes along. I wish everyone could simply have one girlfriend for their entire lives. I wish it could have been her but after two years it ended right there on Seventh Avenue with my heart beating and my mind realizing that it had won.

     MY mind had won. This much is clear. My mind loved me and resented her because she took up not only all of my time but all of its time. My mind was selfish and told my heart to go to hell, because my mind liked to play with books, word processors, beers, cigarettes and myself. My mind played with me and tricked me into thinking she wasn’t worth it. My mind was wrong but what the hell can I say to my mind to convince it otherwise? My mind deserved to be beaten but my heart had nothing to say as it was attached by a string to her heart and had no way of arguing its way out of THAT one. And now it has nothing to say because it is being dragged along the pavement by her uncaring soul. My mind reveled in its victory.

     "I knew you would cave!" My mind said to me.

     "You bastard," I said, "I loved her."

     "You still do!" My mind said.

     "That’s my point!"

     "Well then don’t use the past tense!"

     I love her still, and never will stop loving her. I pity the woman who makes me forget her, though I am quite sure she doesn’t exist. Fuck my mind – which is what she did – and which my mind resented because it was completely reliant on her input and her touch and her eyes and her smile and her long, long speeches decrying present activities and applauding future possibilities. My mind hated itself for being so dependent on her, and so it tricked me into pushing her away, which makes me violently angry and leads me to wonder why thinking is allowed at all. I love her still and am angry that I spent much of our relationship together buying time for tomorrow, a tomorrow that would never come and will forever haunt me, because now tomorrow is here. Tomorrow is here and there is no more buying time, buying time from her for myself, buying time because I needed to change but wanted to change not today but tomorrow. It is tomorrow and I have not changed an ounce. I am still the same man that she grew to hate. I am still the same man that fumbles through reality without a clue and treats it as if it were a game. I drink beer as if it were refreshing water and I smoke cigarettes all day and all night and when I sleep I shake because the beer fades and the cigarettes are not in my hand. (I also shake because she is no longer in my arms as I dream – a much harsher form of withdrawal). I am still the same asshole that I always was, the same asshole who she knew she could never spend the rest of her life with, no matter what we promised each other during those first few wonderful, fantastic weeks when our relationship took off on a meteoric rise to serious and absurd proportions. She smiles at me from afar now, and there is very little I can do about it, save smile back, with my beer, my cigarette, and my tail between my legs not wagging and instead limp and dead. I am dead, and she did not kill me, I killed myself.

     I’m sick of talking about my mind and I’m sick of talking about myself. I’m sick of the pictures of sanity and I’m sick of sanity. I pretend to not understand but I understand everything. I feign insanity and yet I am completely aware of everything, completely sane. I’m not insane and understand everything that is going on around me like the birds and the bees and the trees that shade my heart which is bouncing along some unknown sidewalk behind her who does not care and I understand, yes I understand, that she does care. I am not a liar but I lie a lot. I am not lying but I have trouble telling the truth. I tell the truth to others most of the time but find it difficult to admit the truth when I am looking in the mirror and frowning at my blonde hair and terribly skinny frame. Truth escapes me when I confront myself because I hate knowing what I already know. If I already know it I don’t want to know it again.

     My brain conspires with my mind every once in awhile and then my heart rises up in arms and wonders how it is supposed to compete against such mental juggernauts. There is no peace treaty and I find the heat to be expansive as I sit and stand and witness the inner-workings of my body develop and contradict each other so violently. I have never had a thought that I believed; I was always onto myself; I would not think that. I would not think what I believed or believe what I believed because that would be too easy and so I agreed with my second-guessing self-nature and disagreed with everything that I believed and purposely set out to do what it was that I did not want to do – all the while arguing with everyone that told me I was wrong, including myself. I have no sense of wrong and right even when I know what is wrong and right; I find it difficult to discern between the two.

     My mind won and I did not even put up a fight.

     I talk about myself; I talk to myself. A long time coming on bland highways that lead to nowhere but the same place – long turns that lead back to the same place again, and again. I stall and wonder why. But then I wonder why I have to change at all. I wonder again and again because if she really loved me for who I was I would not have had to change a bit, at least not on her terms – I could change on my terms.

     IT’S gone and I have no idea how to get it back. She used to love me and she still does, though she no longer wants to kiss me or have me call her my girlfriend. She was my girlfriend for two years and I have no idea what else to call her. Do I call her my friend? She’s not my friend – she’s my girlfriend. The thing is, though, that she is NOT my girlfriend anymore because I pushed her away and did not love her. I loved her and love her but I did not love her as she deserved to be loved. As the most amazing woman on the planet, she deserved to be loved as no one had ever been loved before. I failed. I try to ignore the facts and the truth but even I have trouble believing my own lies at present. Buying time and spilling lies that I did not believe – what a fucking incredible way to advance a relationship. Holy Christ.

     "Well I love you, too." I told her as I held her hand tightly and smiled at her with sincerity. But two years later sincerity had lost its definition and I was still searching for the paradise that we knew when we knew each other well – the beginning. The beginning is when I fell in love with her, when I first saw her, when I first held her hand, when I first kissed her lips, when I first tasted the fruits of paradise and burned down my own inner walls of compromise. I could not resist the kiss, the bliss, nor could I forgo the temptation to be with the most beautiful woman on the planet. I wish I had the willpower to resist, and now I am made to cease and desist, resisting is no longer an issue.

     But I did love her and in many ways I still do. Certain factors, however, have changed - the difference now being that I also hate her. I hate her so violently that sometimes I shake with rage and wonder how it was that I put so much confidence in her in a beginning that so obviously predicated an end, like all beginnings, like all happenings, like all promises that eventually have to be broken as nothing is set in stone and everything that IS set in stone will eventually be worn away by weather and erosion and the weathering temperament of reality that does not accept and in fact scorns permanence, just like she does. But I did love her and in many ways I still do, and I hope she still loves me as I brood and weep and smile only with a tear in my eye and a look of depression dominating my sweat-filled brow standing on Seventh wondering where to go next and hoping that a car will hit me destroy me run me over without taking away the pain because after life there is death where pain and regret will still dominate. Regret – regret, regretting again and forgetting to forget again as times change and constants continue and my poor sense of tomfoolery has left me barren, broken, and bewildered. Bewildered in a sense is a fine state to be in – a state of perpetual, preposterous well being. A state of wonder, and a state of falsehood and lies that ignores love and plays around a garden of Eden with devils and snakes and goblins surrounding your every step – no step is a safe step – no decision worthy or worthwhile. I sit in front of a smiling face and I wonder how she can be so hypocritical.

     How can she be smiling when things are so tense? How can she grin at me when she knows she has ended my existence? How on this fucking brown earth can she feign light-heartedness when she knows goddamn well she is making me miserable? How can she pretend that we are friends?

     We are not friends and anyone who implicates that we are is lying, including her. How would she know? How can I define her eyes? Could she define mine? Does she have any idea and does she even think? I wish she thought about how much I loved her, instead of ignoring that fact. She knew how much I adored her, but she had no idea, nor does she have any idea, how much I loved and love her. She makes me tremble with delight when I imagine her in any and all circumstances. I’ve never come across anyone as beautiful as she is, which makes it incredibly disturbing that I drove her away. There must be something seriously wrong with me. Why would I want to get rid of her? Stop asking questions and start answering them – jackass – jackass of the hypocritical front, finding security in solitary confinement – and why? Another question that will not be answered once again as these fucking minutes keep coming and the end never seems near though I wish, wish for the end and for a clarity which is non-existent but who created existence in the first place? We are not friends and I am ashamed to say that my behavior may have negatively effected our friendship. It is all my fault. I weep.

     I do not cry in public but I probably should. The dancing bears in my mind all sing different songs but the theme is always the same: die. They don’t say it but they sing it (beautifully), blatantly arguing for my demise as I argue that I should survive, even though I don’t believe it. I don’t believe anything anymore because my heart was destroyed, even though I cannot blame anyone other than myself. Lost lunacy in a dark world leaves many to blame for all that has gone wrong, and for all that has gone right. If certain things had not gone so well they would never have had a chance to turn bad, rotten, or leave me in a decrepit and handicapped state of mind. I am so downtrodden and depressed that it may be considered, to a degenerate few (including myself), to be humorous. I hate it all – all of it. I am made to be happy but in actuality happiness is something that perpetually bothers me. If I am happy then I have nothing to complain about. I want to cry in public because I want the public to react and comfort me. I want to cry in front of her so she comforts me and hugs me and offers me a smile, even if it is sarcastic and conniving and condescending. I want a smile from her and I’m willing to cry for it. I’m willing to sob. I’m sobbing right now and there is nothing that will stop me, not even her smile. I hope to die but I know that I am not that lucky.

     And I did love her and I admitted it to her, albeit belatedly, because I fell in love with her from that first moment – that first moment. She asked for a light and I had a lighter. She said she was taking a bus back to New York City and I said that I had a car. I love her and loved her then. The sardonic, wry, witless humor that was spewed out of my mouth was both dry and real, though it was not realistic. She stood in front of me and I wondered how long she could stand to be in front of anyone like me. I am a beautiful man but I am annoying and I think too much. It was eventually too much for her and she left – sprinting away from me at high speed and hoping that my legs were not strong enough to catch her, not to mention her mind. Ah she would have loved for me to catch her, but she was completely satisfied and in love with the fact that I was too drunk to do so. Beers from heaven are beers, and I hate the fact that I am an alcoholic. Amazingly, I didn’t have a beer on that ferry ride from Nantucket to Hyannis where I met her but maybe I should have been drunk. I was drunk with her presence and I am not quite sure that anything else can matter as I fall, fall, fall back into a wall of eternity that is, indeed, permeable.

     And if I did not meet her I might not have been the happiest man alive for the past two years – and I might have not been the most disappointed man alive for the past two years – and I might have not been so angry and so in love and so elated and so destructive every day for the past two years. And if I did not meet her I would not have met her, which would have been incredibly upsetting. The trees were not green, they were red – and then they turned to blue – bleeding red on a blue surface that should have been fired up into a wall that I no longer wanted to run into, but could not avoid. I was fired up. I was firing my emotions forward and she would be the recipient of every thought that I could possibly imagine.

     I knew she loved me but I would never admit it.

     She is not a poet but she writes incredible poetry. She is not a writer but her words make me cry. She is beautiful and some people stare but they do not realize that her beauty comes from the inside. Her beauty comes from her heart, and the sense of glory that comes from her heart shining its love and innermost secrets on your soul is impossible to describe. I long for closure but know it will not come from her, for she is gone. Such is the splendor of love, the splendor of innocence, and the false hope of yesterday replacing tomorrow.