and I gunned for your love right through the sun

137,627 words into the epic unpublishable mess. I "won" NaNoWriMo on November 10th and just kept going. I don't know how long it will take to finish. I don't know how much of myself I'm going to have left at the end.

I expected depression. I expected pain. I expected random flashes of anger, I expected hopelessness, I expected inchoate loss as I remembered days of love and days of grieving. I expected all of these things, I thought I was prepared.

I didn't expect to miss you this much.



After all, you've been gone from my life long enough that I'd forgotten many of our conversations. Oh, the general feelings, the general mood, I've retained, but the actual words said, the moments shared, those had slipped my mind. I'm finding memory's razor is sharp, sharp as winter sea air, sharp as scalpel sin.



What I'm saying is that I expected it to hurt, but I didn't expect to feel you so keenly once more. Simultaneously present and missing, close and impossibly distant, and it's striking me as profoundly unfair all over again.



I am broken. I know that. I have spent too long, especially of late, surviving in the interstitial spaces of my own head. I know I need those around me who not only see my good points, but see and accept my broken places. You did that.

You once told me that there was nothing I could not share with you, no secret, no urge, no memory, no nightmare, that you would not accept. That I could tell you anything, absolutely anything, and you would love me still.

I relied on that.

Then you left.



And it's been years. Years of healing, years of processing, years of seclusion, years of putting myself together after I tore my life apart for you. There are things I lost that I will never get back, and I had made my peace with it...until this.

And I'm still writing. And I'm still discovering. And now I'm wondering how close my memories of you are going to get before I can leave you behind, once again, where you should be, as you are nowhere to be found.

"You drove me to the fire
and left me there to burn..."

Now I just wait for the fire to burn down, and it's going to take some time, because all I have in memory's spaces are accelerants and tinder. Gods help us all.

But I get through this, my lost love. I survive. More symbols carved into my bones, into my flesh, more scars, more pain behind my eyes...but you didn't kill me when you left, and your memory won't kill me now. I'll get through this. But it's going to hurt like a wicked bitch until I do.

And I'm wondering how many words it's going to take before I'm done.