Who I Keep

    There is no worse feeling that I have ever experienced than hating yourself for who you love.  Knowing that all the beauty of her, all that made you fall in love, has been tarnished or destroyed.  An unrecognizable person stands before of you, a hideous deformity, twisted and demented, yet still you love.  There remains a light of hope, just a dream, a horrific nightmare from which you will wake to the beauty of the past.
    Every morning a disappointment, a reminder that it is real.  A realization of the truth, that the love is gone, that it was perhaps never real.  Your home is now a prison, you become a captive of all those things that remind you of her.  Sadly, few things in this world aren’t a reminder.  A joke, a shirt, a restaurant, a dear friend, all such things are imprinted with memories.  Wonderful moments tarnished by circumstance.  Years spent building, and now, you just want to set it all aflame, and bask in a final moment of warmth before it is cold, dead wreckage forever.
    A wound begins to close, a scar forms.  More real than any marring of flesh, damage that cannot be avoided, merely adapted to.  You try and find pride in this scar, wear it as a badge of what you gave, of how hard you tried in the face of indifference.  Your scars will not weigh you down as much as hers.  She will awaken to the realities of life, and humanity.  She will feel the shame and remorse one day, and if she doesn’t, count yourself lucky that you are free of such a beast, absent of good and value.
    Try and focus on the beauty that was.  Separate it from her, refine it down to what made you love, and better know yourself.  Learn to see it in its most base and true forms.  Learn to trust yourself, and what you love and value.  Never compromise in what you want.  Don’t settle for perverted versions of what you seek.  
    Know that if you struggle as I have with such feelings, there is another like you.  I hold to love, and share it with you.  I respect your fight, and I will hold you when you cannot grapple with the darkness any longer.  To the honest, the true, the lovers, the dreamers, I will love and keep you.