He

He was my stars. It sounds cliche to say but it's how I felt. He lit up my night sky and made it shine, he sparkled across it, every aspect of who he was blazing individually in the abyss that every other component of my day-to-day created. He was the sun itself too, the darkness rose like a tidal wave above me in his absence, crushing me under it's oppressive weight and holding me there like a submissive prisoner until he returned to explode through it and make his way back into my arms. I never thought of him as damaged. He was perfection embodied to me, a blue-eyed angel with dyed black hair. I couldn't see past his resplendent smile, and into his fragmentary heart. To me the boy was the center of my barely-spinning universe, there to revolve for - to get out of bed for. He was a drunk conversation on a Saturday night that turned into the person that defined me, the name that followed the 'and' after mine. He was everything, and he was alive.
     And then he was gone. In the blink of an eye he crumbled and fell, like the empire of Rome my love became obsolete  a mere memory of something once so grand, so impenetrable. Sometimes I wonder, late into the night, if it was my darkness that got him - my pain. Did it seep in from over-exposure to my toxicity. But he screamed through his own gloom, battled his own obscurity. I saw it, in the depths. Behind the speckled iris of his perfect eyes. Beneath the musical chortle of his lively laughter. Hiding in his pearly smile. Lacing all his perfect words, poisoning them with inevitable demise. If I hadn't been so dependent on him, maybe i'd have voiced my concern. Maybe, if it wasn't for my demons to distract me, I'd have noticed the skeletal form of his. Those dancing imps, come to taunt from Satan's nursery, to prey on the minds of the innocent, deforming their dreams from celestial wants into ineffable horrors. Without them, i'd still have him.  
     I do what I can to forget him, to be rid of his formidable presence. But there are things that don't go away. The memory of his cautious touch - that hits me on the first day of summer. The air changes and as I inhale the heat I think of his almost accidental brush of my flushing cheek on the evening of our first encounter. In the winters I taste him on my lips, dry blood and lip balm - that season's memory cocktail. The thought of never seeing him again no longer haunts me, as with every slowly ebbing second I run closer to him. To one day greet him in the comforting arms of death. Sometimes, if I ignore reality and hole away with the memory of him, he feels so close I can almost taste the chemical sting of his skin on the tip of my desperate tongue. It's then that I struggle most, when I can almost deny that he's truly gone. Everyday when I first awake there's a second I cherish. It occurs just before I open my eyes. In that beat of my struggling heart he is still alive, and we're sickeningly happy again. My sky's restored and my planet isn't orbiting blind.
    But then the moment passes, and the grief holds me once more. Tighter than he ever did. They say pain can't be remembered.The sensation can be recollected, but the sensation not mirrored. It's simply ghosted, a phantom reminiscence of something agonizing. But in that moment I feel that pain, it shoots through me like the day it happened, just as sharp and just as harrowing. Constantly I live through that  knowledge that it will come again, and as I close my eyes at night I dread the rising sun, dread the day ahead. Sleep taunts me with it's necessity - I curse it until with exhaustion it beats me down, until the dreams of him begin.
  Even in the wake of happiness I feel that brush of pain. Every laugh, every smile, is laced with something sinister; because I survived - and he didn't.