Your images echo off the walls of my mind and all I’m left with is a transparent ghost, a phantasm that will never capture the essence of who you were and what you meant to me. Your features come into focus, clearly and with a precision that only someone who spent years studying you could remember.

Like a blow to the stomach, I intake my breath quickly and sharply. A thousand painful pangs accompany your face now. A hundred thoughts cascade into my head and intertwine until I can’t just focus on one and the result is a jumbled mess of meaningless words that I wish could have saved you.

Like a gun to the ******* head, the bullets ricochet and pierce every part of who I am. The loneliness of your death, the emptiness you left behind. I have no idea how to even begin closing the gaping wound purging a ******* river from inside me.

Like catching water in a bottomless glass.

Your fragility comes into view, the softness of the lines etched into the corners of your honey stained eyes. I see the waves of your hair adhere to your face with the tears that just won’t stop coming. I watch you stumble in confusion and desperately claw your way to what you believe to be your savior. I hear you mutter something to a deaf world, your beauty contorted in pain. I see you take your last breath and watch as you pull the trigger, with the gun to both of our heads.

I held him tight and felt the slow roll of slight drops rocket down my arm.
One.
Two.
Three.
Gaining momentum, I lost count. Quickening in speed and increasing in number. The sobs racked his body back and forth and his muffled cries echoed in my bones.
His pain radiated through me.
Weeping pinpricks formed on my dress, his pants; darkening the material, turning it a uniform, grungy grey, running away from the initial impact. Puddles of salt collected in the fold of my bow. Weighed down with everything he felt, they clung to my skin and then they drip dropped.
The oh so familiar fabric of his shirt stretched across his back; arched with grief, his head now buried in the palms of his hands.
I sensed the appreciation of my silence, the aversion of my gaze; the way with which I accepted his broken form and withheld all questions and all speech.
Nothing mattered but us, but now.
My body changed positions, revolving around his anguish; finding comfort in his closeness, his warmth. My hand found its way to his and he returned a gentle pulse.
The storm was not over, but I knew then how much I loved him, how much we needed each other; he was my sun, and I was the moon and the stars.