This is how I lived back then - through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armour against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth.
...and there was something strangely focused about you, something light yet unyielding in your eyes that stirred both envy and desire in me. It was as if your presence already overpowered me, like a prophecy I was unable to read.
I am done with pretending that I've erased you from my mind. Some things cannot be erased through silence. Some people have that power over you, whether you like it or not. I begin to see that now. Some people, some events, make you lose your head. They're like guillotines, cutting your life in two, the dead and the alive, the before and after.
Maybe, I say to myself or to the crow, maybe that end, the end you can only see after it is too late, maybe that end is what makes a beginning what it is. What else is a beginning but the end of something else?
This is the very best moment we will ever share. It is a better end than beginning. It was the end. But we did not know it then. You do not know the end has happened until later. Or you do not admit it. Looking back, you can see it. And you realise that all the time after that was just an effort to keep going as if it weren’t already over.