Oh darling, you'll never realize just how incredible this is for me.
How you can tell me my worst nightmare has come to be,
And ask me to accept it, and I do.
Oh my love, you really don't have any clue.
I am astonishing myself, and you have no idea what it is.
No notion of something impossible as this.

I am surviving the only thing I never thought I could.
And you assumed I always had and always would.
You see me and I go on, permanent as the night.
You can't imagine what it's like,
To do what I've been told to do.
To have more weight than you can carry heaped upon you.
And then more,
And more,
Within the shortest wink of time's despair.
To be expected to seem as if it's light as air,
Even as you wonder if tomorrow you'll even be there,
Crushed this next second? Or this one?

You don't know the edge I stood on, toes curling over an emptiness that yawns,
Wind tickling my back
To make my stomach leap the gap,
You don't know what it feels like to take a deep breath
And take a step,
When you know that there is nothing there in front of you but air,
And a ground too far away to be perceived or even dreamed. No matter how long I prepared,
The fall loomed at a sickening skew.
You have no idea what I've just done for you,
How it is the most I've ever done for anyone.
How each day I fight the ***** of fear that I'll be gone.

Morning breaks and I wake up thinking, "Today I too will break. This is it.
Today I will feel the force of all of it."
You don't know how each night I lay down, shocked that it was not today.
You don't know just how easy it would be to walk away,
Send it all to hell and say enough.
I am not trapped here by anything but my choice to love.

And that is why my existence is extraordinary,
And shall be.
No matter where I go from here,
Each day that I wake up with that crushing fear
And live anyway
No matter how much else may go astray,
I will have already been astounding for just that.
I will have already fought the hardest battle:
There is no winning
There is no losing
No banishment of scared and sad and lonely
There is only

I am not dead yet.