Takotsubo

A moment stopped in time,

such is what is carved on the walls of my chest.

***

I would suffer a thousand more years,

stuck alone in this rotten world.

I would bear the pain of being away from her,

like Atlas bore the sky.

I would wait for her another few milleniums,

if it all meant I could hold her face again,

even for just a moment.

The last flutter of her eyelash,

was the last spurt of life that shook my body.

I have not felt my heart since.

They returned her to the ground, my everything.

She who is all and more to me.

I am now lost, lost in an unknown sea,

whose water is bitter.

Suffering walks beside me, loyal like my shadow.

Dark.

Ah, angels of desolation, givers of somber epiphanies. Why did your hands have to find her?

Humans have no wings, that you know, like you know fire burns. Yet you still hissed in her ears that she could fly.

Had I known, I would have turned into the wind just to drown out your voices. I would have become gravity to keep her feet tethered.

Icarian fall.

Wretched, wretched angels of desolation,

you have turned me into a monster of guilt.

It eats away at me like rust corrodes iron, like acid between my ribs. Drives me crazy like rats running through the walls.

Will I ever shed that sticky, rotting skin?

My body was a porcelain crucible for you to bathe in.

Scorched and cracked, I am an empty cellar without you. Cobwebs and mold in every corner. Mice made a home for themselves in the dust of what used to be.

Oh my darling, I died with you.

And every day I die again.

Again, and again, and again— cursed loop.

Dawns gnaw at me, dusks spit me out hollow.

Morpheus, that cruel shepherd, has grown bored of me. He will not lull me to sleep anymore.

My mind is

U R A E

N V L I N G.

—Dear, it was too good

living in your eyes

for me to ever find

another land to call home.—

Each day without her presence,

cuts away a piece of me,

a merciless ablation procedure.

No amount of propofol could ever keep such pain at bay.

Of me, just some crushed bits are left;

I am somewhat neither alive, neither dead.

Nights pass,

like knives through my kidneys.

You never heal from having loved, wails the moon. She knows…

I let despair engulf me.

Agony.

In the sink, I spit out pieces of my pleura

and black bile.

I want to tear out my tongue and teeth to make more room in my mouth. My screams can't get through, my throat is too tight—Someone, please, slit it. You must!

To let the sounds out,

to let life pass through.

Rabid.

What am I? What is left of me without her?

*Grief*. Only grief. Raw and pure—

All mighty. All consuming. Parasite that I embrace in the name of memory. Yours.

I am grieving, and nothing more remains.

When I am long gone, it will still be here.

Absolute.

I cradle the absence tightly in my arms;

for she is all I have now. All that still stands in the wake of your disappearance.

She does not hold me back.

The cold one.

And I realize I am holding onto my own shoulders.

My arms slip right through my hollow body,

I am made of emptiness.

She was my substance.

Covered in stigmata and wounds that refuse to heal.

My organs are festering.

My mandibles have fused together. No words can slip past my lips dried shut.

I have become a mouthless wraith. A wilting figure.

Only the deafening clinking of the sepulchral ornaments hanging from my ribs resonates.

I wander the streets like a lost dog, dragging the logs my legs have become, from one sinkhole to the next.

Shop windows reflect a version of me I do not recognize; their glass turns me into a smudge, a passing stain.

The gutters call my name, write me messages in mildew.

I am the ghost.

I haunt my own existence.

Wide eyes, trembling limbs and chattering teeth, a blood drum for heart.

Permanent state of

shock.

Ah, spirits of misery, why did you have to cover everything in ashes? Why must she be an effigy? Why must she perdure only on the altar in my psyche?

Why must my soul be a martyr?

Abysmal void.

The sky hangs low over my head,

lower than I remember. Heavy, as if it, too, carries the weight of what I have lost.

On my tippy toes I can almost touch the stars,

but not quite.

How cruel.

How cruel is it to keep you so far

away

from me.

I tried to tangle your laugh in my hair, but it is turning into an echo. The pattern of your freckles evade me.

Has it been that long?

Long enough that I have started to disremember?

Have the worms come to know your face better than I do?

My heart aches and stretches in hopes

to reach you.

“Maybe we should start digging instead of clawing at empty space,” it whispers in my ear. “Please, I miss her,

oh, so much…”

Memories are scalping my skull,

and tumors are growing all over my skeleton.

Oizys has sunk his poisoned fangs into my stomach,

I cannot eat anymore, I can only

waste away

under the weight of this

eternal affliction.

No matter how much I scream at it to go away and finally leave me alone,

it lives where I live.

By my pale skin enclosing rotten flesh.

By the pit in my belly where shreds of your sweetness lay.

Unfairness, in all its terrible glory, has sentenced me. I must remember her longer than I have known her.

Decay.

The fools tell me that at least I got to meet her.

Ruins.

***

Oh, how I miss you— oh, how you miss from me.

Maybe in the ether

can our soul meet again.

Our faces would be different,

but my bones would know you.

They would say to yours,

“Don’t you remember me?”

Oh, love of my life, life of my life.