My memory serves me far too well.  It reminds me daily of that which has been lost.  Perhaps it is not lost to me forever, but it is lost to me nonetheless.  I know you still live here and are out there right now.  Maybe we both stand at this moment under the same sky with the sun shining down on us; maybe the same breeze touching my skin also touches yours.  Such knowledge does little to soften the hurt.

The wounds carry with them tales of us.  It is in them my memory resides, and it is there the pain is most evident.  Even some other face in which I see your own serves to embolden this self-inflicted misery.  While they may smile and talk and fill some portion of the abyss you left within me, they can never take your place.  I cannot allow it.

Something in me needs this pain, I fear.  Does it serve to remind me that I still live, that I continue to feel despite the anguish, that some measure of humanity remains intact despite the tattered heart?  There exists a bewildering comfort when I touch the emotional scars.  Twinges of grief-laden agony offer themselves to the light of inspection with each tortured caress.  I wear the wounds in proud display like battle scars from the war of love.

I tried to be someone else.  I failed.  The more time I spent trying not to think about you, the more time I spent thinking about you.  Fighting for a chance to live again—to love again—brings me closer to the battleground where our passions once raged and further from the bountiful fields where you are unknown.

Injuries that will never heal evince the place I keep coming back to, a place that can never truly be mine without you but likewise will never let me go free.  My poor heart is anchored to the devastation.  Unable to protect myself from the draw of you, I roam aimlessly through wastelands you will never again visit with me.  Why does the desolation and woe comfort me when nothing else can?

Finding somebody else is futile.  As long as I know you might come back, I am foolish enough to wait.  There is no explanation for this imprisonment I heap upon myself.  The promise of seeing your face again is sufficient to chain me behind the bars of empty promises.  Your are not gone forever, I hope, yet I suspect I would wait that long still.