Afterwards

After

          So you've gone and I'm still here and, unfortunately, I still love you. Well, I moved 2.2 miles, actually, so it's a slightly different here... but the second part of the previous statement is still true. I'm not the same person I was before or even during our time together. Your absence has changed me in ways that are difficult to describe, but here goes. I've evolved into a person of the night. The term sounds...funny... but "night owl" fails to describe what I've become, and “fearer of the day” is just terrible. Basically, I cover the windows and avoid going out while the sun is high. It isn't that I dislike light, it's just that every foray into the day seems a torturous and unnecessary ordeal. Again, it isn't that I dislike light. Quite the opposite...it's darkness I can't tolerate. 

          What is darkness? Merely the absence of light... or something more? To say that darkness is the absence of light is to leave unspoken and thus diminish that which we lose when the lights go out. Darkness is nothingness, a void. Darkness is the absence of warmth, vision, and reality; an abyssal vacuum sucking at everything within its infinite reach. Ideas, happiness, memories, all fall prey and are drawn into its ever gaping maw. My mind, it seems, is all too happy to feed the beast. It paints the blackened walls with every memory I've ever wished to forget, leaving me to gather the screaming pieces of myself. 

          How then, you may wonder, has someone with such a cheery relationship with darkness become a person of the night? I suppose I am not so much a person of the night as I am a person of the fourteen CFB lamps that light my 12x12 flat during the night. Their white, pure light is not anathema to me as is that of the sun. I sleep during the day and burn the night in the fiery fluorescence of my lovely, energy star approved bulbs...by this system I avoid the abyss of darkness and the searing memory of sunlight. 

          The lamps took care of the visuals, but my imagination is not, despite what its spelling may hint at, limited to images. No, I have learned by a quick and unpleasant process that sonic darkness, silence, is to be feared for similar reasons. So, I bought a big-ass-stereo-system. It's a "Beatbox by Dr. Dre." The fact that he includes his name in the product title may make him out to be a pretentious dick... but I probably owe the Doc and his box my life. I never turn it off; the ever present pounding of random Russian trance wraps me in a blessedly anesthetizing cocoon of aural overload, shattering the silence that would otherwise allow ghostly remembrances of your voice. Thanks, Doc.

          Yes, I've tried to cope, but I miss going outside in the daytime with a painful and often frightening intensity. Beside the fact that the 3:00 AM inhabitants of the all night grocer are anything but amicable... I miss the feel of the sun on my face, watching it set and rise, its warming red glow when seen through lidded eyes. More practically, I miss not being rendered unsightly by a cadaver-esque pallor...at any rate, I won't soon get cancer from over exposure. Hey, check out that silver lining. And you accused me of pessimism... I know I've become tired when I start talking to you, and now I've done it in writing...that probably isn't a good sign.

          I imagine I'm tired all of the time because I tend to be awake more than the average person, it's probably got something to do with the fact that I hate sleeping. My hate is understandable, given the fact that sleeping requires I close my eyes, and that closing my eyes surrounds me in darkness which then plunges me into a tear-jerking sorrow. Whenever my body grows tired enough to spite my attempts at consciousness, I dream of you. More often than not my dreams aren't good. I wake from dreams of your screams to the sound of my own, lilting tragically over the racket of my inconsiderate, bastard neighbor pounding on the wall behind me as he threatens to call the landlord.

        I lost my voice after the first two weeks, screaming isn't so good for the vocal chords. Now, the sad excuse for a voice that tears its way through my throat is more comparable to the bellowing of a bullfrog than the speech of a human. It especially hurts whenever I remember the first time you told me that you loved my voice, that I should say everything in song. I live in fear of the bad dreams and the physical and emotional pain that they bring, but I live for the good ones. From those, I wake with tear streaked cheeks, my still dreaming arms wrapped around a phantom warmth beside me. 

          You were my sun, and I miss you even as I'm plagued by memories of you. Your laugh that haunts my every thought, your smile that floats before my eyes...the letter that repeats in my head despite countless attempts to forget it. I miss you, and I miss me as I was before, a whole person. I miss us, I miss life as it was. I miss you, and I am tired.

          I'm tired of over-bright fluorescent lighting and shitty Russian music. I'm tired of forsaking the sun because it reminds me of you.  I'm tired of blinding and deafening myself to avoid remembering you. I'm tired of this life, so miserable a replacement for the nirvana that we shared. I'm tired of these insufficient memories, I'm tired of myself, and I'm tired of you, goddammit.

          So fuck you, and me, and all of this. I love you, good bye.