My body didn’t seem to know it was emptying of life.

Perhaps, like me, it was still clinging to–something? A confusion of pain and nothing and everything and–

My body is a graveyard of corpses that never learned to breathe.

In the night I watched the white cloth colour with crimson drops, and I knew, I knew it had ended again.

Didn’t know a heart could be so fragile, that it could splinter at a touch.

Didn’t know so small a one could cause such soul-wracking grief before it had even begun to beat.

Didn't understand how Providence could watch, silent, as I wept and begged on the bathroom floor on my knees, holding the remains of a scarcely-imagined future. Again? Again?

Reminded again how fragile a life was, or how a body could betray, become the place that destroyed rather than nurtured.

How can I miss someone that barely existed?

Reasons.

A reason.

No longer.

As everything empties, I am emptied with it. I don’t know how to be whole again when I am a burial ground of unfulfilled hopes and shattered dreams, visions of the life I imagined, each wave of pain another reminder of how it cheated me. And as blood pours out like a sacrifice to the life I might have known, I think of how ironic it all is—that to most, you were nothing, a collection of cells and no more. Here one day, gone the next.

But to me, you were loved. For me, you existed.

To them, I can only say, “Forgive me; I could not save you. Forgive me; I can never hold you safe. But if you were someone, and if there is a heaven, perhaps I will see you again. You, and the five that went before you.”

I love you.

My throat is arid with the dust of thoughts I can’t seem to form into words. Or feelings. I can never seem to differentiate between the two, though not for lack of trying.

There is something clawing its way through the pit of my stomach. It burns at my throat, yet it stops at my clenched teeth and I can’t give it release.

I feel—

What do I feel?

These days I’m not sure where I am anymore. I seem to float above myself. I can’t find a place to ground. My eyes burn with the dryness of tears that only come when no one's there, but I still can’t find a name for the feelings that overwhelm me. I feel far from everyone and I don’t know if it’s me or them that’s causing the breach.

It’s probably me. It’s always me.

“You are a black hole, destroying everything that gets close to you.”

His last words, that thread themselves through my thoughts and clang against the inside of my skull, especially when I’m going under. Always, always those words, reminding me again and again what I really am. And who am I kidding? Can it be a lie when I am the broken and others who have come and gone are still fine, seemingly better when I’m no longer there?

I don’t want to be; I never wanted to be this. I'm the one who has to live with myself.

And I can’t blame them.

Because when I look in the mirror, I, too, see only disappointment, frustration.

That I might have been so close to salvation, perhaps. In some ways, I had managed to return to a semblance of normality. Or at least, it seemed so.

I just don’t know. I don’t know how to forgive myself for something I’ve never been able to name. Perhaps, for just existing. Needing so much. But I always give too much, too. I carve out pieces of myself and plaster them onto the ones I love, thinking they need them more than I do.

The surface is still too far. And as far as my arms can extend above me, it’s still not enough to reach it.

And I’ve tried. I have tried so hard, so hard, so hard. Because I had promises to keep, reasons I tried to cling to.

And I suppose, I’m still holding onto them, only drifting in a different way, or they’re drifting from me. I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s me. I’m fading, fading, and I can’t even orient myself enough to find a ground on which to stand.

It’s hard to breathe and I can’t help but hope as I fall asleep that I won’t wake up again. The one who held my breath is long dead.

And all I can think as my mind slips is, what a failure and a disappointment I have been, not enough for even myself, not enough for anyone when I am like this, so far away and drifting still, into a sea of nothingness so deep that it’s just utter, utter pain, and,