If I could speak in a language you could understand, I would tell you how much I loved you.  I would tell you that you were loved, despite what you might have believed in your hate-filled heart.  If only you’d used your mind you could’ve seen.  But you didn’t.  Didn’t want to or didn’t know how.  I’m not sure.

I’m cold, shivering almost, as I write.  My veins are half-full, my stomach empty, my head light.  There are things I should be doing, puzzles I should be piecing together, but I can only sit here and love you.  It’s all I can do.

I am an artist of rage.  I create by feeling.  I take a bucket of my emotions and spill them on stage or page and leave it up to the beholder to find the beauty.  As it is, I can see none in any of it.  It is all raw and unfiltered.  My hands are clumsy tools, my mouth an open sore.  I stumble through this world a vessel of unwanted memories; an island of misfit misfortunes unto myself.

Everything hurts.  You can attest.  You were there.  You remember.  Or do you?  Is remembering something you can do where you are?  Or are you nothing at all?  Do you exist only because we remember you?  And when we begin to forget, will you cease to be?  Will it be as though you never were?

Are we all the fabrication of some dreaming demigod?  Is it pleasant to Him or a nightmare?  And when He wakes, what will become of us?  Is the world tailored to His flights of fancy?  Is that why I sometimes see it scrambling to retain its shape between the darkness of a blink and the focus of opened eyes?

Will I be like you one day?  Of our world but not in it?  A memory, a patch of grass, a name in stone, an open-ended love?  Will I be a waste of thought, an emotional vampire, a highway where the loves of others will extend unending to die unrequited? And when those who remembered me fade, will I disappear entirely from the fabric of existence?  The demigod will roll over, His brain dislodging and righting itself, and all of a sudden a new world exists, one without me or you or anything we can recognize.

Nietzsche said “In all love there is some madness, but in all madness there is some reason.”  I do not believe this to mean that love is reasonable.  We all know better; it isn’t.  It’s highly irrational, volatile, loud, fiery, and utterly bewildering.  That’s what makes it so amazing, so intoxicating.  It can’t be controlled, and we can’t be controlled when it takes hold of us.  It can’t be killed, no matter what so many jilted lovers choose to believe.  It never goes away, even when it seems to have abandoned us entirely at one end or another.  It always exists in some form, lying dormant until the song on the radio or the smell of the breeze or the way the skyline catches the light stirs it into weaving its baffling magic into our limbs.  It scares us, excites us, smashes us and builds us.  It is a rollercoaster, a plump recliner, a car crash, a hammock, a feather, a sledgehammer, a bandage and a gunshot wound.  It looms over us, sometimes threatening, sometimes inviting.  It lies in wait, it pounces without provocation.  It disentigrates, it regenerates.  It kills, it revives.  It is terrifying and beautiful.  We are nothing without it.

So how can you understand what I say when I say “I loved you”, past-tense, like it’s not real anymore?  It is; it’s you who is not real anymore.  A ghost, a memory, a lightly-held gathering of mist on the wind.  And I loved you.