...And on that day the whole world was changed; capsized and cleaved between sanguine and frayed, but I’m bound to stay, to bear witness, to escort her beneath the waves with what time she had left. While the storm raged so too her quirks transformed (from mere ‘affectations’ to DSM terms), but it's too late to set these things straight now- The sea has claimed her. And the sea keeps what it claims.

A ruptured hull and a flooded galley. The rot spread far, no tug nor sail could salvage her - she, a vessel lost - despite how much we swore and bailed. And and and she’ll keep dying. On loop. On repeat. For the rest of my life. The helm clutched wildly while the wood cracked beneath her feet. Keeling, but stoic. So the deck split open and the mundane scattered, now recast new, now sacred things like the sealed door to her old room and our father’s voice on the machine and and and since then I’ve abandoned hope.

What swallowed her, took “Home” as well.

And grief wanes, then comes crashing back, in waves. Each deluge hits; submerging you. Again. And again. So, you grab hold and brace and with time it lessens - until a plain, empty chair or a comment unsaid throws the world in relief - where they'd sit, how they'd speak, what they'd add, were they here …because they're not. Not anymore, but a period’s too final. An ellipsis must do. so we just shut your door and don’t enter that room.

So ease the winch and douse the sails. Float. Numb, directionless; wherever fate entails. Thus, months pass on until your thoughts resolve: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on…” [And a friend of mine said don't lose sight of that you've gotta look out for yourself first: “Just be sure to put on your own air mask, before assisting someone else.”] Yeah, but good luck with that. Good luck feeling whole. That gutted feeling's fixed now. Ingrained, it's just part of you so smile and breathe then cling to the debris; to pamphlets; whiskey. Closure's bullshit. It's a myth. We just grasp for what floats on the surface of the darkness in which we’re all adrift, but I don't crave these things at all…

I've clung to anything that floats.

With grief, each day drifts past at a snail’s pace. A gray expanse. A vast, mapless terrain. Pacing back and forth. Haggard, yet bound to this raft. Knowing life’s somewhere forward, but forever cursed to look aft. “Against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Like a sighting of shore on a craft past repair; like a drowning man, beached; drunk on mad gasps of air. There’s a guilt that you carry. There’s a load to be borne. There’s an asterisk to joy should some “normal” return.

So, what remains? A world-worn malaise weathered by loss & grief's unspoken weight? “Just reengage. With time it fades.” Or so they claim. Yeah, so they say…

So, dry yourself off. Work. Stay busy. Rinse/repeat. Don't sit and sulk. [Such madness: the same thing done ad nauseum - expecting what? Some new result?!] Because there’s a hidden pattern. Can’t you see it? There. Sewn in the lining. The confounding variable has always been me. The one true constant. So, fake your composure. Just get back out there. Staunch your doubt. Quickly, unmoor! Cast off and and ignore the winds and and discount the choppy water. And suppress what you can’t truly process.

But I can't chart a new course, because I can't find my true north.

Though, it’s true a ship in harbor’s safe, but not why ships are built, why sails are raised. “Half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea.” Exhausted, thin, aged and battered; circling the drain. They all laud your sang froid, but don’t see, it’s not strength. You kept launching anew; shedding jetsam and layers until the hull‘s all that’s left of this pitching, hollowed-out freighter. See, you’re locked in a circuit - caught in the same refrain - you’re not tacking towards something, you’re just fleeing; evading. Some are lost in the storm. Others, forged by the rain; for it is loss that instructs on the true worth of things. So, each day wake midst the wreckage and still rebuild again, for to love folk means that we all must in time learn to bury. ‘Either get busy living; or drift lost, in past tense’ is now my coat of arms, the only thought that makes sense.

All to which I am anchored. The rigging, ballast, constraints. The one escape from all of this and the last choice that feels sane is: I must tear free of these riggings. I must molt from this cycle and burn all the remains...

...her voice trails off and our eyes meet for three unrelenting seconds more than they ever should’ve. Exhales. Too much is said in this one, drawn-out glance, this opia, held locked over our untouched food. Pauses. Shuffles feet. Momentum can disguise a flaw; quell nagging thoughts; hold doubts at bay, but now the curtain has been torn back and what routine masked, our eyes betrayed because now we both have understood and worse, we know the other knows that at its root there's nothing left. Our last conceit now lies exposed.

Each couple self-appoints a role where one’s “The Lover one The Loved”. The comet & its satellite; The tourist and the settler, but going through the motions has become the norm, our default state. We've played our roles for long enough only to find there’s nothing left offstage-

Shared lies are based in a claim which binds; and deceit shoulders this weight. Our fiction’s strength: girded by our faith in it, but one which can’t survive unveiled and borne in vain.

“The architecture has been abandoned”. Empty, for what now seems like years. Our pride in guarding what we’ve built has made prisoners out of engineers. And we are both inmates, we are both guards and now we know the other knows. These barren walls. There's nothing left. This whole charade now lies exposed

She dies each day I remain. We lie awake; nothing’s changed. My tired refrain: “I’m not sure, I can’t say” Yet, she’s resigned to stay, to hope, to wait. She’s tried to pace and stay sane, but with each day something new fades. The patron saint of patience and restraint, but you’re tired, so tired you say...

We stagger around the towers of your boxes that we’ve filled and tape shut each memory from the lives we once built. Though mere steps from each other, but now ghosts in affect, we are maneuvered 'round with deference, but dared not looked at directly. Linens weightless and absent, yet it's me who’s erased. Just a husk, haunted now by an afterimage. Voices fire and echo. Ripostes float round my head teasing each quip, each reference ...were you here, you’d have said.

These boxed up things - once our future, now just phantom limbs; vestigial territory. "And if you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you stop your story".

And like a secret dialect that twins made up and spoke. All these shared, arcane meanings. All these lost inside jokes. We’re the last of this tribe left alive who can speak what is left of this language and it’s lost when you leave. Like the book that you made me, like our nicknames and songs. All those speech acts are void. All the referents lost. All those stories are forfeit; all fond memories waste. Now just benchmarks against which each new lover’s weighed-

Each lost phrase, a wink, an endnote to untethered scripts; decoupled allegory. "And if you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you stop your story".

Hope is habit. Wait it out, son. Let the waters rise & pull you under. Don’t hold your breath it’s a waste of time. Simply breathe in, swallow, give in- Don’t you bother, blazing your own trail. Push those thoughts aside or they’ll destroy you. Live day-by-day or you’ll lose your mind. Softly: queue up, settle, fall in-

“And so much of me is gone”, he said “So much of me is lost that could’ve been.” So, he learned to cast no shadow and to live each day as if holding his breath. Each step we advance on a course, we leave some unattended version of ourselves behind; the speech givers, the extroverts, the lions we swore lay dormant inside.

But hope is measured day by day, though. Stolen from and tithed, with each road forsworn. An open page; shrunk, by each word typed. Boundless promise: bridled, hemmed in. Thus, hope smothered, grows faint, then grows cold and something in us dies; some spark, some ember. An empty shell, eyes glazed, chin turned down. Breathing. but nourished, cowed, emptied.

Each concrete step towards something means we leave some unattained version of ourselves behind: The prime movers, the rainmakers, the bolder selves we nursed on the inside. So work, consume, get married, just “persist”, grow old then die - while half asleep though in your mirror glaring back: this life of quiet desperation that you lead.

Your spineless acquiescent laugh; your fear of making waves. Each craven anodyne remark prescribed this life you’d have. One day one hand will be the last you hold. It’s rising sun, your last daybreak and on that day, you’d trade it all to go back and shake yourself awake. To find some shred of courage, and rise from this genuflect to live a life true to yourself, not to what others expect. To chase what made you happy, your integrity intact, to escape your inner monologue and act. God damn you, act.

♦ “Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.” - Stephen Vincent Benét

[original, added lyrics]

We keep acting; a performance from a script that no one recalls. A hush between us. A voice that falters. A pentimento; empty walls. And with a slow, nameless ache - we drift away...

The cold ride back home the truth slowly dawned on me that I mapped myself to your needs and starved those parts of me which mattered. Again. Just Like clockwork. Yep. Note to self. The truth’s hard to face though, when the fault squarely rests on my shoulders. Ironic yes, I did neglect the very traits which I suspect appealed to you in the first place...

Stepping stool and marionette; shadow, plaything, supplicant; punching-bag & ornament. That’s how bad I’ve let things get.
Window-dressing, William Tell, attaché and personnel; puppet, showpiece, charlatan. Yep, lately that's all that I've been.

The more that you withdrew from me, the more your allure grew conversely because that thing which retreats from us, gets pursued, imbued with value. Right? To wit: you...

Paperweight and marionette; scapegoat, doormat, epithet; afterthought & ornament. That’s the state of things, I guess.
Chaperon and silhouette; valet, chauffeur, supplicant; punch line, sled dog, sediment. That’s how bad I’ve let things get.
Condescending, malcontent. Distant, cold, and reticent. Frigid, backseat mannequin, but lately that's just how she's been-

Each apostasy, each detail, each small misdeed; all catalogued. New eggshells to weave between the dark towels taped o’er windows (a panoply of symptoms/signs). Long-missed stark parallels: Grey Gardens. Cloistered. Her spool unwound. …who lives like this?

So I nodded through each flimsy exculpation as though the orbit of the planets could absolve you. After laying all blame elsewhere, at what threshold might some fault lie with you?

Just a token gesture. Any tiny effort. A phone call, a letter. Hell, you owe me that much...
Since each year that passed, you worsened and folded further inward to feel safe. I adapt, contort, self-censor; all speech filtered to map to your wavelength,

But at last I’ve grasped the terms and the conditions since I was cherished only if I was compliant.
The pedestal to which I’d grown accustomed had a leash and came with strings.

A skein of tubes, hissing machines. Inoperable. A waiting game.
What’s more she made me swear to tell no one. The last shred
of control still hers to claim. A last foothold. And all of the
furtive side-glances and platitudes just drive the nails
much deeper in while this blight kept seeping down
down down within her bones. God, how alone she
must have felt. Her honor guard inadequate.
Just us? Is this the measure of a life? No
queues of friends, no violins? (some
gray hospice) And the films all lie,
because at the end there’s no
one alert still left. The last of
her passed some unmarked
night, terrified in a
room by herself.
...sinking
down
The
tireless
maintenance of
smiles and masks.
Agendas, impostors,
all less friends, than
tasks- Say, is no interaction
of hers on the level? Is no one
else screaming and drowning as
well? For she walks alongside them,
she goes through the motions while carved
out inside. Hell, does no one else notice? This
type-cast existence: despondent, self-conscious.
These roles we inhabit until our masks become us and sinking down…
And the sun, the sun it sets for the final time. And she watches it pour out for the last, last time.