Betrayal is an intimate crime, one perpetrated solely between familiars, for a stranger has nothing to gain.

Why do I feel so betrayed by that last kiss?

Death lay on your doorstep then, waiting in shadows deep to consume what you had been in life’s fullness.

Already your mind had started to fade, a once quick wit and sharp intellect made disheveled by tumors and disease.

Then we said goodbye.  Your family had come to “intervene” in their own venomous way, and so we two parted in tears, our final, partially sane moment marked only by a kiss.

And what a betrayal that kiss has become.

I didn’t mean it to be our last.  I didn’t mean it to separate what had been from what was to be.  I didn’t mean it at all.

Is the sense of betrayal I feel my own self-imposed discipline, the act of chastising my own heart for giving in to those who you wanted kept at arm’s length?

All I know is this: That’s not what a kiss is for.