I am undoing you from my skin.

Rupi Kaur, milk and honey

I had lingered too long in the keeping of my own unquiet mind; it was time to start moving again. I boarded a flight to the West Coast, found another world wherein I might incur mirages of meaning; but I was never content to find respite in the crystal depths of the Pacific. I was born of the freakish Atlantic, a daughter of its far-off, forlorn tides. My pulse recalls songs of its salt-bitten winds; a rainswept necropolis in gradients of grey; the nascent floods of brine that cut colder than my bones. I lost my childhood to those sepulchral shores, and returned ten years later to kneel in the bitter currents and pray for my own restoration.

This ontology of decision and desire seems more wrenching now than it ever has before. I have spent so long crushed beneath the foot of my first lover, groveling and gnawing upon exigencies of my own survival. I suffered under his architecture, the monstrous ingenuity of this master builder, my Daedalus: between us, we shared one strange and brilliant soul. I am the consequence of his failed designs, the product of a mind like a beautiful machine, enshrined in its crucible of ash. I forged a double consciousness within those sterile fires: engendered the two-tongued heart that will devour us both in the end.

There was a morning, just one, in my recent memory, when I might have escaped from the labyrinthine past. What a blissful prospect it seemed, to evoke the fate of Icarus: to forsake a foregone body and fall burning into the sea. But I did not succumb to the breathless lure of that desire; for you were there behind frosted panes of glass. Your sleeping form recalled the ecstasy of more blameless days. I could still feel the rapture of our time spent in balance: the effortless joining of two reckless, untamed things, smoking and speaking and making love on the living room floor. You swam the dark waters of my enigmatic needs, traced patterns from my tongue upon supernal strains of music; you lured me, like Eurydice, from self-appointed death. A part of me lingers in the channels of England: unseen, eternal, and imbued with an endless longing. There I lay to rest not only the specter of our lost time, but also the memory of the child I was, immersed in the beautiful beginnings of my madness, when you found me in a smoke-dimmed room and made the first of your efforts towards my heart.

I know that you tried, in your own peculiar way. I know that you cared as well as you could. But I was not fully known to you. A body half-starved, craving tenderness and trust: untethered though my love may often have seemed, each moment took root like cypress in my soul. You were saner than I; you never understood, because you never could feel, how very much those shared months meant to me. I doubt that anyone in your position ever really will.

I have lately written, with such precise devotion, these effigies of what we were, what you are, what I always will be. But our mimetic self-abasement is unfurling still. I wanted to wait for you. Of course I did. But as early as the first glimpses of our distancing, I was already moving towards the threshold of that room; because this, you must understand, is a condition of my survival. I must hold this butchered consciousness together at any imaginable cost. I cannot hope too fondly, or love too fully, or write too honestly now—for though I can endure losing you, I cannot watch you fade. Have you imagined, all this time, that I feared the tragic implications of your absence? Nothing, my darling, strays further from the truth. There is no desertion that I cannot withstand, and this itself is what frightens me: I am reluctant, as ever, to confront the colorless expanse of my apathy. When you go, my narcoleptic mind will relinquish this, and expunge it all with an unsettling ease. You will not linger within me—not even slightly. You will lose your meaning all too quickly. I will forget what it felt like to love you in the first place. That, my love, is the tragedy I sought to defer.

My god, I really have lost you, haven’t I? You really are not coming back. Go ahead, then. Take it all. There is no bitterness left in me. Finish what you yourself began—for you wanted this once, more than I ever could. I blame you for that, you know. But I will survive. It is time to start thinking and loving again. It is time to forge some kind of peace with how very alone I am. So now, if it really is the end of this, I will go without question. My resistance bears the form of an absolute submission: one final testament to the clandestine longings now eclipsed by a reality I can hardly accept. I will know no anger, no remorse. I will simply remember you fondly. I will recall, with gratitude, the mind that once sheltered my own. There will be no grief, no horror, no hurting: just the melancholy ending of another finite and impossibly lovely thing.

You quieted my mind even as I tore it to pieces in front of you. You helped me to heal, and you wounded me past endurance. When you kept yourself distant, averted your dark-eyed gaze, you forged, implicitly, the fresh scores of scars that shower now across my skin. But if these myopic inclinations mutilated my reason, then they also made possible your most miraculous act. Through your gentle pragmatism, you came to learn the nature and the chaos of my form. You derived rhythms from its tremors and blood. You achieved precisely that which I had never believed possible. You revived this body. You restored its life. You knew what I was, and you saved me all the same. Now, at last, I can breathe again, and for as long as I live, I will be thankful for that.

My friend, my love, you were well met. You were enduring. You were adored. I will miss you unrestrainedly: I will endeavor to feel the fullness your loss in every corner of my being. Someday, I will find the courage to only want what is best for you—but lately, I have been too afflicted by desire to see beyond the shadow of an inexorable ending. And so I will not write of you any longer. I will not gnaw upon the bones of an irretrievable past. It is time, I think, to learn the value of solitude once more.

I write here an ending to these uncertain days. This is your farewell and your freedom. I ask nothing of you; I cling to the illusion of your affections no longer; I release you from it all. I hope that you go where you will, and love as you choose, and remember this well—but you have no obligation to me anymore. I suppose you never really did. And in the end, it would scarcely have made a difference. There was never any health left in me for you to protect or preserve.

Darling, you should understand by now that I always, inevitably, survive. I see no other option but to live and to live on. So take your leave of me entirely. There is nothing left to know.

I love you. I miss you. I’ll be fine.

Now, go.