Still, unimaginable horror.  Black like ink poured over the world.

“It’s called night,” we once said to her.

We hadn’t the heart to tell her she was blind.

When she ran headlong into a wall, we’d offer, “It might be a wall, Sweetie.  See if you can feel your way around.”

We knew it was a wall.  We were staring right at it.

Crystal blue eyes like magic water.  How could such beautiful things shroud their owner in perpetual darkness?  What a cruel dichotomy.

The stillness settles around me now, cold and featureless.  Winter sky.  No clouds.  No wind.  Just cold and dark.  Even the stars twinkle with chills.

But she had loved the cold.  Never once did she see the change it brought to the land.  Not one autumn did she fill those blue eyes with the sight of leaves changing colors, blowing on the wind in a dance of rainbows, leaving the trees in a mass exodus and exposing the bones of the world.

How she loved winter, though, and without seeing a bit of it.

She could taste snow on the air, smell it long before the first flake tumbled from the sky.

She adored the feel of it against her flesh.  Wet and icy, the frozen trails it painted on her cheeks are still fresh in my mind today.

And her nose.  Ah, she could wear snow on her nose and make it a fashion statement, one she alone could make work.

Even as we slipped along carefully maneuvering over ice and deep drifts, she plunged headlong into the whole of it, a dark figure lost against a white backdrop of forever.

“I love how it feels when it gets between my toes.”

I’ve never met another who feels the same way.

My feet move carefully as my hands flail in the blackness.  A lightless room with no walls.  A cell that eats vision and gives nothing in return.  And it goes on and on.

Had she felt like this?  Ever?

When finally a crescent moon leaps from behind a canopy of naked limbs, the water stretches out before me, a liquid carpet framed with ice that brings together the land and the sea with a touch of both.

Her vision waltzes on the pier.  A ghostly apparition made of memory and regret.

Things can never be that way again, I tell myself quietly.

The words stab at me with heartache.  We had said the same thing to her as she slipped away from us.

First went her balance.  We had to carry her up and down the steps to keep her from falling from the back porch.  Pitiful, meek agony kept silent.  She never complained.

“Things can never be that way again,” we’d tell her when she asked why play had become so dangerous, why jaunting about in sunshine she couldn’t see threatened her as it had never done before.

She didn’t understand our answer.  Then again, she understood so little by then.

Second went her mind.  Eating and drinking, simple tasks the both of them, became forgotten memories, strange activities for strange beings.  Just not her.

I walk toward the water’s edge, toward the dock.  I can’t take my eyes off her specter.  She dances for me, calls to me.

Night presses in on all sides.  Cold night.  My breath freezes to my lips.  They undoubtedly are as blue as her eyes used to be.

I keep walking.

When she wanted to stand in those final years, we held her up, a living puppet made of flesh that barely kept itself alive.

And we would carry her out into the snow, hold her upright and walk her along so she could feel it between her toes.  We would hold her head so she could face the barren clouds.  From that gray infinity stretching from horizon to horizon she would feast upon the smell of the coming snow.  She didn’t remember why it was important, at least by then, but she knew it was important nonetheless.

My feet slide on the wooden planks.  Ice sparkles like diamonds, sheets of it stretched like nature’s jewelry upon each board.  Be careful that you don’t slip into the water.  I ignore the voice now.  It’s too late for advice.

Last went her life.  In the darkness she had always known, in that place where nothing could be seen and where she lived her whole existence, we knew she couldn’t see how thin she had become, how her once beautiful hair had fallen out in thick patches.

Snow between her toes.  The thought crossed my mind as we said goodbye, as my own tears drew icy tendrils down my cheeks.

If she was to know nothing else, let her last experience be the cold she so loved.

I reach the end of the pier and carefully settle on its edge.  My toes dangle absently in the murky water, its frigid embrace unknown to my mind.

Her dance has carried her out over the lake’s surface.  Her feet barely touch it as her hands stretch out and wave through the night.  I know such things are not possible, yet I watch her anyway, feast my eyes upon that which is so painfully missed.

“I love you,” I whisper.  “You look beautiful tonight.”

“I love you, too.  Won’t you join me?”

So I move my last, a simple gesture that slides me from the pier and into the chilly depths to which we lost her.

My breath is wrested from me, locked from my chest by the weight of freezing water.  Still I go to her.

As I slip beneath the surface, I feel her hand take mine.  Her stunning blue eyes look at me, and I realize for the first time ever that she sees me.

We embrace as the night settles upon us for the last time.

Now I understand her world.

Impoverished of heart by a loneliness so profound as to be insurmountable, I sat alone in the confines of an existence marred by heartache.

I was alienated from my family after coming out.

Struggles with accepting myself and what it meant to be gay in America forced me to realize I would never be equal, could never share in the same joys as others.

I buried myself in work, became the workaholic that would define me for many years to come, and that only to realize immediately how unhappy it made me…yet driven to pull the covers of employment over my head so the world could not find me, could not torment me.  Or at least so I could not be forced to examine my own misery in the reflection I cast in the mirror of years.

The tatters of my life seemed like nothing more than fodder for the cannons of hate and agony.  Such was the self-imposed prison in which I became entrapped.

Too immature to understand what would be so clear a decade later, my sole purpose in life defined itself in terms of “being with someone.”  I raced from boyfriend to boyfriend, from bed to bed, from heartbreak to heartbreak.

Finally, in a relationship that ended long before I realized it—or accepted it, I wasted emotional credit buying time in a desperate search for that which mattered little yet deserved my every breath.  My heart lay broken upon the eternal shore of deception and selfishness, and there I remained for too long trying to put it back together.

How can one survive without another? I often asked myself, and with equal rapidity I gave the same tired answer: One cannot survive without another.

So I went on aching and lamenting what I thought I needed, comparing my own misery with that of “normal people” too crippled by anguish and torment for their own good.  I knew someone without another meant little, deserved less, and died reaching for loved ones who did not exist.

I refused to be that person.

Torturous distress in codependent hell motivated me to seek others, to keep looking for something more.  Life became an endless search.

When finally I met Derek, suffering beset me from every side and I reached out to him with a longing I dared not acknowledge.  In return, he became a confidant, a friend, a lover, a roommate, a sounding board, a debate partner, an adversary, and a loved one.

Our relationship scarcely could be defined as smooth.  As it evolved, however, and as we nestled into a rapport based on kindred spirits and comfort, I slowly became aware of the change that had come over me.

Through many years wrought with turmoil and fulfillment, the longing within me grew to accept that a friend meant far more than continual heartache.  Having someone to talk to, to share ups and downs with. . .  Well, life took on new meaning then.

No longer besieged by my own desperate quest to live the normal life that others lived, the life I knew I could never have, I wrapped myself in a settled existence surrounded by love, sometimes hatred, and always trust.  Joyfully tumultuous and furiously sedate, a mixture I came to recognize and appreciate in all human interaction, we became brothers who tended to each other, spoke without reserve, expected brutal honesty, and lived comfortably.

Never before had I trusted anyone with The Kids like I trusted Derek.  Never before had I equally despised and adored someone without whom I felt I could not live.

And thus began the curse that would vex me for years to come.

When finally The Disease wracked his body with ailment after ailment, each worse than the one before, already I had started the process of pulling away, of seeking my own life, of feeling trapped by this mutually beneficial living pungent with secure subsistence and—in my eyes anyway—lacking the verve and vivacity I felt I needed.

Yet after all those years, one thing I knew to be true was that I could not turn my back on him.  Even as my resentment grew, I sacrificed more and more to help him survive.

Now more than three years after his death, I finally realize that empty space can never be filled.  Other songs will fill the void, yes, and other bouquets will lend their fragrances to my days, but alone I must mark the time since his passing, alone I must bear the weight of what has been lost.

Too often I find myself calculating days with increments of “What would Derek do?” and “What would Derek think?” and “What would Derek say?”  Too often I stumble through my mind wishing he could offer his intellect and wit to just one more trouble, one more question.

“Death is a dignitary who, when he comes announced, is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him.”  Ambrose Bierce penned those words.  On many occasions I have used them in reference to Derek.

But what of those left behind?  Dare I apply the same commandment to the bitter taste of loss that even now infects my palate?

Sometimes death is less a dignitary and more a terrorist.  What then?