At Peace With Goodbye

June 2007

Remembering you is never enough to smother the flame above my heart, memories of what has been will never be suffice to subside my desire to touch you one last time. Photographs of you do your presence no justice, this paper form of you only makes my eyes feel dry, no taste of you for my tongue to be satisfied. The flashing reels of your past are nothing like your stride in living form, those movies of what you were fail to make you real again. The warmth of your hand cannot and will not, ever be duplicated. Even in my dreams your voice is shaken, your skin a little colder and your eyes glossed with an eerie hologram of a window once giving me insight into who you really were. Destiny brought us together and fate took us apart. We were two halves of the same whole, we were like yin and yang; different and yet the same.

One last time, I’ve begged to hold you so many times since you left. In the violence of madness you passed away from me, never giving me the chance to tell you how I really felt, forever now I must endure the repetition of what I wanted to say. The glass tore you away from me, from the cuts your blood spilled, but so did your soul, taking back that which was given eighteen years ago. Tossed and tumbled, shaken to the core of what it means to be awake and aware. Like a nightmare everything was wrong, nothing was as it should have been. Cracking, crushing, breaking, bending, and smashing all overpowering like water in your ears, nothing beyond your skin ever became reality until it all stopped. Suddenly it was over, dust settled, glass broke nevermore, the vehicle slid into stillness, the beating of an ever slowing heart overcame everything else until it also ceased.

Coming to terms of a life without you has been like a story I’m reading, a place and a time that I don’t exist in, this isn’t real, this is just a bad dream. Never again, while I breathe, will my hand hold your own. No more whispers, no more secrets, no more smiles, no more tears from you; just mine vanishing in the sunlight while the curtain is called upon this stage called life, letting go is the hardest thing to do.

Here I am without cause, without hope, holding nothing but my own guilt, my own selfish thoughts. You weren’t supposed to be taken away from me, how do I move on, this isn’t fair! The smell of your hair, the scent of your perfume, they linger in my head, and sometimes I swear you are there, somehow always in the corner of my eye, never within my vision no matter how fast I turn my head. So vacant, so empty is my soul, so alone and so afraid to travel beyond what I know, what I feel, what I remember.

Every step that I take, I listen for your’s, following in some kind of cadence, replaying in my head over and over, like some kind of celestial orchestra; treading so light on our feet, this is what I want, this is heaven, this is all I need to exist; rain, sun, wind, nothing broke the perfect peace of you at my side so long ago this was nirvana. Now the thoughts plague my life like a virus, nothing heals, nothing can fill the holes I bear. Don’t tell me that hobbies will pass my time, no new joy will blend away the loss, laughter will not soothe my hurt! Each scar, every birthmark, I marked down on my map of your very being, trotting the globe of your divine nature, this is borderline obsession, to hell with the earth – you’re my world, I want to live here like this forever. That was my dream. Now time has passed and so have you, age has come unto me like a northern wind giving me chilled recollections of a warmer yesterday, where the sun in my eyes didn’t bother me while next to you. Giving up my senses was nothing, your presence I could feel on a whole different level, somewhere within me, somewhere close to my pounding heart.

But this is it, hate, pain and misery must pass along with you. I must learn to live again, death took you, not me. I was meant to go on, reunite with you when I’m done here, learn other lessons less painful. Wait for me beyond the stars above, on the other-side where peace and love abound, far from my comprehension, somewhere outside of time and space. I know you’re not here though I feel you, and that’s enough for me to find strength in, that’s enough for me to live off. I know it’s not fair and I don’t like it, but I have to live again, my heart beats on at a different pace, but the sun continues to rise and fall, my eyes open and close and open again, for a lifetime in this cycle, somewhere in between I have to come to terms with the truth. Death is a wretched thing, but it’s a fact of life, no man can defy the grip of mortality nor no woman. We all have a time limit, we all have a given number, we have to do a lot more than sit around and wait for it to be called. I don’t want to sit and wait, let it be a surprise, why ruin the fun of life. We live beyond physical forms, something within lives on, somewhere out of sight, death will come, but life moves on.

Letting go does not mean forgetting, it simply means living life again with the lost in our hearts rather than haunting us in our heads. It is time for me to say farewell, I need to be at peace with your absence, I need to be at peace with goodbye.

This essay is available as an audio track on SoundCloud: