Without You

It feels like just yesterday that we were together. It feels like just this morning I said goodbye for the last time. Except I didn't know. I didn't know that it would be the last time. You never think it will be. You never want to imagine it might be. You never, ever want it to be.

Some days I imagine you're being carried away from me. They've forced us apart. I can almost see you kicking with all your might and I can hear the painstaking sound of your screams and your fearful cries. I try to get to you, but you're just out of my reach. Every time I try and get closer, there's some invisible wall that forces me back each time I try. Not being able to reach you breaks my heart, and watching you go, in seeming slow motion, feels like torture.

Without you, it feels as I have been forced along. Forced through the days as more and more pass since the day I last saw you. They're dragging me further and further away from you and my desperate attempts at escape are helpless. So now I just sit here, crying silent tears because you're gone. Because they stole you away from me and I'd give anything in the world to have you back here with me. Because without you, all hope seems drained from the world.

Without you, I am trapped in a shadow. I don't even know where I am anymore. I am alone, all hope and light long gone from the world around me. Because they went with you. Each beat of my heart feels like a stab wound openly bleeding, each breath like it could well be my last. It doesn't feel like I can go on, and yet, somehow, I am forced on.

Without you, life has been stripped of meaning and purpose. I exist. I want so much to live, but I don't seem able to. The world is an odd mixture of red and blue. The purple that seeps through sings a sorrowful lament of wishes and lost dreams. White, pink, yellow and a different sort of blue are fading fast in my memory. I try to cling to them, a vein hope that something reminiscent of life with you may return, but they're quickly slipping away.

So I hold my breath, hoping with the last little bit of lingering hope I do have that I won't have to be without you forever. That I won;t be trapped here forever. It feels like it has been forever when a light appears from above and a hand extends down to me. I go weakly toward it on my hands and knees and struggle upward to reach it. It drags me up and out into the open world, full of colour.

Though the moment, I set down, the colour begins to slowly fade away, coming to stop on a washed out echo of what it once had been. This is the world now, without you in it. Not as dark and gloomy as before, but not as bright and joyous as with you in it.

Without you, the world is robbed of it's bright colour, it's happiness and joy. Without you, I seem to have forgotten what it feels like to have a friend. I've forgotten what it's like to be happy and to have hope. But as I look around, I can almost see faded echos of you. In the softness of the flower petals, the warmth of a fire.

You are everywhere. Everywhere but where I need you most. I don't want to trap you. I want to want to let you go. I want to want to set you free. But I am not ready, and I don't know if I will ever be ready. I am not ready for every single moment with you to just be a memory. I am not ready for you not to be here with me. I don't know how to live in a world without you in it, and it scares me. I don't know how to go on without you by my side.

Surely, it's got to get easier somehow. Surely, one day, I won't have the urge to cry or to scream. Surely one day, I won't want to just sit still and do nothing because I can't share it all with you. Surely, one day, it won't hurt every time I think of you. Surely, one day, I won't start to cry every time I say your name. It's got to get easier somehow, surely. Just, not today.