“My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.
Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
~ Falsely yours”
― Charles Bukowski

This is going to be as hard as chiseling away the rock, to reveal the statue that lies within, as so much of me became wrapped up in you that, even now, I feel your essence encase me. With every word, pieces fall away.

I have this image etched, of me standing by as a mere observer, as your fingers slid, one by one, from the edge. Knowing the anger that raged inside you at the dying of the light, and the betrayal you felt, and I tried to help you. But you stubbornly clung, and nothing I said or did could dissuade you from your lies, and the reality that fate had thrown you.

Tim, there is a part of me that almost hesitates, as I’m not sure what to say. I hesitate in conjuring you. There is a jumbled mess of words and emotions that rumble inside of me, and untangling it all will take some time. Even with your cunning adaptions of the truth, and everything, all your broken bits and stolen pieces, I do still miss you.

I wonder if I’ll ever understand though your motivations, and why you felt compelled, again and again, to furnish the truth with such fallacies?

And don’t give me that goddamn look, you know full well you often were a lying piece of cow-dung.

Perhaps you honestly believed you could hide those piles of poop you had created? Eventually, hiding them only brought them to my attention. Your sleight of hand, eventually, had me searching all the cracks and crevices for the truths you had spent so much careful time in hiding from me.

Within all the other half-truths, amongst the ashes I carry still of yours, lies the questions I never had the courage to ask – such as, was it you all those years ago I saw in the pub by the Lake were we met years later? Or was that merely a foreshadowing? Where you that crazy birdman of the Lake, spewing nonsense and tapping your feathered staff like a drum to a beat of your own? Was there an element of you that was always a humpbacked shamanic vision of mine?

Is there some symbolism, some iconic truth? Was that your staff of feathers I saw when I finally returned to you? Or is that a mythology I have conjured?

Once I had been coerced back after my escape, after I had ceased thinking I had truly vanquished the hold you had over me, were you always the Kokopelli of Grey? With your familiar hump, and gunny sac of fables, and those tarred and feathered friends that in time became mine, was that a mirage? Was it a cage we inhabited, or a cave, or perhaps a bubble of something rare, of wishes and destinies, and a world created from the bones and ashes of our dreams?

There are many other more tangible holes in time in your history that I have just not had the courage to venture to untangle from your lies. Always swirling around you were these hidden things, quiet voices I could never make sense of. Something, something, but I never could hear clearly, never could discern what truths they whispered.

Time has passed, and as the curtain has closed on those four-square years, I admit that I too rode that wave of selfish dependence you relied so heavily upon (although for entirely different reasons).

No Tim, I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass, and forget about that 12k or so that magically disappeared from my bank account. You are a little thieving creep. Was that a debt to your dealers? Probably. I was warned about that, but money never meant as much to me as it did to you. You never could accept that. Did you ever finally understand that none of that mattered? Did you finally understand I could have loved you wholly, fully, and even without conditions? If you had but trusted in your gut. If you had had more faith.

You somehow never believed me, you never understood. You could never accept that I never cared about what you HAD or didn’t. Tim, I was not impressed by bullshit.

I will love the scarred you, the scared you, the foolish you, the addicted you, the pained and angry you, I always will see good with the bad of you. Always.

Love,