To You, Beyond Reply

I talk aloud even though I know that there is no one left who can hear me. I'm not really looking for a response—it's just that the silence has become too much for me to handle; it weighs down on me so heavily that my mind is getting close to collapsing under it. It's like words are coming from my lungs; they're instinctual, desperate, and ultimately pointless. 

I talk because if I don't, then I might as well agree with extinction. This isn't so much a letter as a confirmation: it is my voice retracing its steps and confirming that I exist after my love for you. Grief has not just been visiting me; it has taken up residence in my life. It has usurped your place the same way as death does, and I can't help but walk around inside my head like an intruder, repeating your absence to myself so that I know it's real.

When I write to you, it's as if talking to someone who's dead, divine or is permanent. I don't expect a response from you, but rather acknowledge and pay homage to the things of the past that you used to respond to me completely. This page serves as a confessional, a grave and a shrine, the only remaining communication that I have left with you.

Where exactly it is/was located when you left. It didn't happen abruptly like a thunderstorm; rather, it came slowly and unresolvable as night does. It cost me a great amount of time to realise that the sun had already negotiated the agreement to depart. Grief is within me now with all the rights of heritage because it has explored every area of my mind where happiness had at one time rehearsed its future. Grief is found where your voice used to be. Grief is awakened by your name.

I loved you not just with my heart, but with my existence. You were not a moment or a feature added onto my life; you were the foundational principles. My life before you was like a series of fully tolerable hours; once you were added, it became a series of fully implied futures and that made everything reasonable. Your eyes clarified the world for me; they were evidence of why all men would endure living with consciousness.

My persistence is now my cruelty. That I persist is the brutish aspect of this chronology. I continue to exist in a universe that continues to go forward without regard for the devastation I have suffered. Each morning occurs as if something sacred hadn't been broken. Every day, the sun rises in blasphemy above a world in which you no longer exist. Time continues to advance, with an insolence that I have neither been able to forgive nor ignore. I follow time, not by my desires, but through an overwhelming exhaustion.

Who is a man, I ask myself, when the person he loves the most is removed from the fabric of his days? A man is forced to be a philosopher, and a man is injured and made a metaphysician. I do not now seek wisdom from the experience of existence, but to seek mercy. I ask the question: why has man been given the capability to understand infinity when he has no ability to retain his experience and knowledge of infinity? Why was the heart so carelessly designed that it has the capacity to contain eternity, yet has no ability to maintain it?

You were my rebellion, and by loving you, I thought, even if for a short time, that there was some justification to life’s existence. That the suffering I had endured was only the prelude, not the final measure. If I were to suffer with you, that suffering had a reason; without you, it seems evil. I am haunted by the memory of both you and by the man that I was; the man that you allowed me to be when you were here.

Memory is my only homeland, and it is both a beautiful place and a place that I cannot live in. I wander the streets of my memories constantly, looking back to the smallest details as a penitent would. When you were with me, your silence spoke louder than almost any man's words. How your presence calmed the raging chaos that was inside me. When I was in your presence, I did not feel ecstatic but felt as if I had been reunited with my own soul after having been long exiled from it.

Do you know what it is to survive love? No resilience; rather, it is to be exiled. Every future feels as if it is a betrayal of the past. I hold up all happiness in comparison with you, and it does not measure up. I see beauty and am bitter because it is not yours. To continue living feels like an act of moral ambiguity.

Yet still, even now, I'd select that lost state of the past again for the same reason. After all, grief is only love after death. If pain is truly sincere, I would prefer to be torn apart by something infinite than to remain intact by something small. If I must long for something, let it be for that which was absolute. If I must hurt, let it be for you.

I have come to understand that love does not cease but simply shifts to a different location. It goes inside of us. It becomes an ache, a memory, a philosophy, a prayer; it helps form how we perceive everything around us. You may no longer physically be next to me, but you are present in each new place I look for answers, in every place I look for doubt. You have become my sorrow, and that sorrow has become my loyalty.

If there is indeed an afterlife (and I do not claim to be a believer in any manner; I am merely attempting to find meaning), let it be one that allows me to retain my own memories of you. Let me carry this grief with me, as it is all that remains of my attachment to you. Let me always be remembered not through my good deeds, but by my steadfast intent to keep your memory alive in my heart.

As yet, I continue to be in this place

Where I am occupied by your absence,

Where I am true to the wounds,

Where I reside without you,

Where I am still loyal to your memory.

I will continue to be in this grieved state in the absence of your existence.

I will continue to exist in a state of grief until I make an attempt to remove this grief from myself.

Yours,

In exile from joy,

In allegiance to love,

Beyond consolation, 

Beyond cure