Sometimes I forget what happened, but not completely, just as if I was in a haze.  I squint to see through the mist of my recollections and in that moment I feel ten thousand things at once.
I catch myself saying to you in my head, feeling it too, I Love You D - - - - -, and I smile and bask in it for a moment, proudly, warmly.  As soon as the words pass silently through my lips, I nearly remember.....
My chest tightens up and air can hardly enter and depart my respiratory system on their usual schedule.  The piano falls, crashes, louder than silence itself.  Steam escapes my eyelids as the pressure builds up all at once but not a tear passes through.  Every nerve in my frozen body is screaming and retching in terror at the thought and I feel the need to run as a child would to his sympathetic mother, but there is nowhere to go, nobody to run to.
I am alone.
I am alone.
I repeat it a thousand times a second trying desperately to process how something impossible like this could have ever happened.   The idea of you not being mine any longer can only be described as surreal and unbelievable, a feeling hauntingly similar to how that same mother felt when she received the ominous knock on her front door years later, the way she felt when the triangular bundle of patriotic fabric first made contact with her frail but steadfast fingers.  Liquid cold encompasses me as the blood drains straight to my feet and out through the floorboards.  All in that same moment I find the strength to inhale.  Like the jolt of emergency paddles, I snap back to life as the gears resume their rotations.

This was not just a dream.