Unspoken: Chapter Two [Draft #3]

     The afternoon was already upon him when he finally woke up from what he assumed must have been an untroubled slumber. Ever since he was a child he never remembered his dreams, but he always knew when they had been nightmares; something troubling yet ill-defined would carry over into those first waking moments and sometimes linger until he had gone through some of his morning routine. He was pristinely at ease this afternoon though, and he felt well rested, so he could safely assume that his sleep had been undisturbed this time. He was grateful for that small blessing, because nightmares had been uncomfortably common over the past few years, and he didn’t like how that lingering unease would filter further and further through his day tainting the rest of it with something approaching low-grade dread. This was especially true on the days when he knew that he had a shift at the institution ahead of him. The place was, at best, unnerving on the most innocent and comfortable days.

     He stretched until he felt as if he might strain a muscle, rolling himself towards the edge of his bed before sliding his legs over the edge. He plodded from his bed into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror under fluorescent lights for a few minutes, zoning out in the process. He wasn’t an unattractive man. He was honest enough to admit that to himself without feeling overcome by shame brought on by his sense of modesty. It had been a couple of weeks since he had shaved and he eyed the razor on the countertop momentarily, but he didn’t feel any overwhelming motivations to rectify that situation just yet, so he casually disregarded the thought almost as soon as it surfaced.

     He felt like he was getting plenty of sleep, but he could make out faint, dark circles under his eyes just the same. Otherwise he still looked as healthy as he could have expected. His skin was unblemished, but he’d always had a fairly clear complexion, and decent hygiene helped to insure that it wouldn’t become any cause for concern in the near future. It was almost disappointing, he thought, that he hadn’t started developing the gray hairs that his mother was already showing when she was his age; he always thought that maybe a moderate amount of gray in his hair might make him look somewhat distinguished, but he wasn’t really in any rush to begin his way along the downward slope of the aging process.

     Finally done with his self-appraisal, he slid his boxers down to the floor and stepped into the shower. He always spent more time in there than was necessary or typically expected of a man, but he loved the sensation of the hot water, almost to the point of scalding, against his skin. Underneath the high-pressure stream of water, he closed his eyes and unconsciously imagined Leyna doing the same thing. He saw the beautiful contours of her form as he had only imagined it numerous times before, without her clothing obscuring the glorious sight. He imagined the water beading up on her pale skin, glistening in the steam-filled air of her shower. Even after sleeping for hours after seeing her, he just couldn’t dislodge these thoughts of her from his mind. He took these distracting musings as a sign that it was definitely time for him to finish up his shower. He wasn’t going to accomplish anything productive while fixating on her naked, wet figure in his imagination.

     After he was done with the abbreviated version of his daily grooming process, he padded through the living room to turn on his television before making his way to the kitchen to find something to eat. The options were limited since he hadn’t been motivated to take a trip to the grocery store in the past week, but there were sufficient alternatives for him to be satisfied with what he had.

     Nathan’s apartment was sparsely decorated, and upon casual appraisal hardly would have appeared lived in at all. Most of the furnishings that he owned were remnants left behind after the sale of his family’s home, things that he couldn’t quite part with for a variety of reasons. He hadn’t kept much, but sentimentality had required that he hold on to a few things, primarily the things that he found some utilitarian purpose in retaining in addition to the sentimental attachment. He subscribed to an almost monastic lifestyle, in large part because of the substantial amount of his income that was devoted to paying back his student loans. He had accumulated more than the average amount of debt due to a last minute change in majors that he felt he had to undertake. Far too frequently as he looked around his apartment he was reminded of the life that he had lived, of the history that had led him to the present, and the life that he was living now.

     During the final semester of his senior year at MIT where he was pursuing a degree in chemistry everything changed for him, his mother’s deteriorating mental health began to degrade at an accelerated rate.  The doctors referred to the collection of symptoms as early onset dementia, what he knew to be a catch-all diagnosis that definitely seemed to fit the conditions. It was painfully obvious that his mother was no longer capable of reliably providing care for herself, so he was forced to make a difficult decision, and his choice was to move back home and insure that she was being properly cared for and supervised. He regrettably withdrew from his courses, packed up the meager belongings that he had in the dorm that he resided in, and began the long drive back home.

     The following months were excruciating and depressing for him. His mother had always been a pinnacle of stability and strength in his eyes, something timeless and enduring. Seemingly overnight she had been transformed into a stranger parading around in his mother’s body. Her appearance seemed different as well, weaker than it had been previously. It was only a few months earlier when he had been home or Christmas break, blissfully unaware of his mother’s deteriorating state at the time, a decline that she was actively working to hide from him, skirting around any symptoms that she had manifested in his presence and chalking them off as nothing more than weariness taking its toll.

     It was a few months after he had returned home when he finally began looking into the programs offered by the state college that was located only a couple of miles from his family home. Because of the circumstances that he currently found himself surrounded by at home or maybe just because something in his priorities had changed, or perhaps it was something else entirely or a combination of numerous factors; whatever the cause, he found himself enrolling for classes the coming fall as a psychology major.

     His course schedule, though not terribly demanding in comparison with the work he had been doing at MIT, required that he hire a nurse to provide part-time care for his mother. Though the transition from MIT to where he was now enrolled had negated his scholarships, it had freed up the funds that he had earmarked for his first couple of years in graduate school, money that he and his mother had laboriously set aside for years. Instead of graduating the previous spring and beginning work on a Master’s, he was starting almost from scratch as an undergraduate again. All of his previous credit hours had transferred successfully, but almost none of them had any relevance toward his new focus.

     Paying the nurse out of the same account that he was tapping for his tuition, from the same funds that he had painstakingly set aside for the pursuit of an advanced degree that he knew would likely never be his, he shouldered a whole new collection of financial burdens by taking on another three years of student loans in order to obtain his psychology degree.

     Those three years had slipped by in a blur for him, no time for reflection or pleasurable pursuits. The time he didn’t dedicate to his education was spent caring for his ailing mother, her overall state of mind deteriorating further and further with rapid progression. A cocktail of medications did occasionally provide brief intervals of behavior akin to her former self. Every now and again he would connect with a former childhood friend, but for all intents and purposes there was neither the time nor the inclination in him to maintain anything approximating a friendship with anyone that he encountered. So, beyond his mother and the short interactions with her nurse or one or another physician that was evaluating his mother’s condition, he spent those years alone.

     He was relieved that his mother appeared to be reasonably lucid during his graduation ceremony, but that could Justas easily have been a figment of his hopeful imagination. It was, after all, less than a month later when she attempted to commit suicide. A moment of clarity had apparently led her to believe that she couldn’t bear to live the way that she was, as a shell of what she once was and a burden upon her only son. Unsuccessful as the attempt at self-termination may have been, it had effectively brought an end to his mother’s higher brain function.

     The period after graduation became something less celebratory than he would have preferred. In her attempt to relieve Nathan of the burden that she felt she had imposed upon him, his mother had created a whole new series of responsibilities that fell upon his shoulders. He was frantic to find some way to care for her now, keeping her at home was impossibility, and the finances required to maintain her simply were not there. After going through the difficult process of selling the house along with almost everything of value that was contained within it, he was left with enough to keep what was left of his mother alive with the assistance of machines for a couple more years.

     Nathan found himself left with fundamentally nothing, and more than enough debt for a single individual to comfortably carry; he was forced to accept the first job that was offered to him. This was how he found himself working overnights at the mental hospital. The pay really wasn’t horrible, the work itself was far from challenging, and the benefits were definitely well worth overlooking the fact that his occupation was certainly a step down from what he was hoping he might be able to obtain. It wasn’t the sort of facility that he was looking for, and the position wasn’t even close to what he thought he should be able to find, but he wasn’t in a position to be altogether too picky.

     His initial reservations against accepting the position were proven less relevant than he had feared. The environment was actually stimulating in ways that he hadn’t even considered, though he admittedly found the place a little spooky in the late night hours. The silence provided him with time to think, something that he quite desperately needed to do, after spending so much time at the frantic pace that the previous years had forced upon him. During the course of the previous few years, he had gone through his life almost wholly unaware of just how little time he was taking for himself, how little he had even entertained the thought that he might actually need to take some time for himself.

     Now, he actually had that time, and he was beginning to learn the benefits that could be derived from silence and time not spent dedicated to pressing responsibilities.

     More than the silence, though, something else was having a very profound impact on his state of mind and the personal realizations that he was becoming aware of since he had accepted this job. That thing was Leyna.

     He only worked with her occasionally, no more than two or three days during any given week, but those relatively rare periods of time quickly became the best thing about his week. He found himself almost perpetually thinking about her whenever his attention was free to wander. He was very much unwilling to assume that his thoughts of her could even potentially be a negative thing.

     Nathan didn’t have much of a dating history, and that was putting it kindly. His experiences with women were limited primarily to caring for his mother for the past handful of years, but he wasn’t unfamiliar with the concepts of courtship and romance. The fact that his most recent serious relationship had ben while he was in high school was a bit of a stumbling block for him, but nothing that he didn’t feel that he could overcome if she would give him the time of day. It was just going to take him some time before he could build up the nerve required to begin sincerely expressing any thoughts of a romantic or intimate nature in an extroverted manner. He had no difficulty admitting these thoughts to himself, but admitting them to another living, breathing human being might take a great deal more concerted effort.

     The fact of the matter was that he was almost terrified of sharing any of his thoughts with her, anything of a personal nature, at least those thoughts that pertained to her. He had been out of the dating world long enough that he lacked the confidence in his ability to adequately convey what he wanted to say without making a complete fool of himself. It had been years since he had experienced the advances of a woman, at least anything less subtle than a prolonged glance or maybe a smile, so he wasn’t even sure if he would recognize interest from anyone, especially someone that he desired so strongly himself. Any perceived cues could easily be nothing more than his wishful thinking taking hold and distorting something totally innocuous and transforming it into more than it really was.

     In reality, he needed her to do something very obvious, something clear and not easily open to misinterpretation on his part. It was going to continue being a nightmare for him, these feelings seething beneath the surface, fighting to break free of the restraints that he had imposed upon them. He knew he would probably never open his mouth and express what he so desperately ached to say to her, not without something from her giving him the faith in himself necessary to take that leap. He already felt mildly alienated around her, petrified at times that she could see right through the mask that he deliberately wore, and into the core of him. He knew those fears were ridiculous and verging on being outright paranoid at times. If she were aware of what he thought of her, it would be a damn clear indication of her lack of interest that she hadn’t said anything. Of course, there was a chance that she was just as plagued by doubt and insecurity as he was, even though he couldn’t begin to comprehend how she might have cause to feel that way.

     It wasn’t healthy, what he was doing to himself. He knew that he couldn’t keep dwelling on his unresolved and quite likely unrequited desire for her. It was enough that he had her friendship, or it should be, he kept telling himself. It was obviously unlikely that anything good could come of his thoughts always finding a way to return to his wishful thinking regarding her.

     He needed to get the hell out of his apartment, to do something active and productive. There was a well-stocked exercise facility on campus, and as alumni he was welcome to take advantage of the equipment any time that he wished. That was precisely what he needed, something to get his blood pumping, to distract him from these thoughts of Leyna, it was necessary that he take action to change his state of mind.

     He had a gym bag always ready in his closet. He grabbed the bag, turned off his television, locked the apartment, and headed out. She couldn’t haunt him all the time, it wasn’t good for him to allow it, and he was damn sure that exhausting himself through working out would clear his head for the first time in a couple of weeks. Even if it didn’t work, it was worth the effort of trying.

Unspoken: Chapter One [Draft #3]

            The acoustics carried the rhythmic sound of footsteps on sterile institutional linoleum in echoes down the darkened hall. In the stillness of the night, those echoes were like haunted whispers from some tragic, haunted past, murmuring seductively into Nathan’s ears. During the daytime hours, the mental hospital was an entirely different place, humming with sometimes erratic activity and displaying plenty of life. At night, it had the quality of a tomb.

            Occasionally there would arise the faint noises of sleeping moans or mutterings from one of the patients disturbing the silence, but for the most part their sleep was unbroken, the magic of sedatives producing peace where otherwise there might have been turmoil.

            As he walked down the corridors of his assigned ward, peeking into the occupied rooms during his routine circuit of this particular branch of the facility, the only thing that he could focus on was how much he wanted to hurry back to the common room shared between his ward and that of another co-worker of his. Leyna had fewer patients under her wing in the rooms on her rounds, so she would probably be back in the recreational area well before he finished up with his.

            This was what he looked forward to during the shifts that they happened to share, as relatively infrequent as they might be. The building itself was an eerie place, that much was true. And that alone was a satisfactory explanation as to why it was so important to spend the nights there with someone else rather than alone, in isolation within the staff offices located on the respective ward that one was assigned to.

            He could hear the muffled audio from the television as he approached the door into the common area. This was their routine on the nights that they were both there, sitting together and watching television, conversing on whatever happened to cross their minds, it was perhaps a bit banal and mundane but he spent every day anticipating the nights when he knew that he could look forward to her presence there with him. Neither of them suspected it, no one did yet, but the comfort he derived from these routines was something that Nathan would look back on with desperate longing in only a short time. Outside of the walls where they found themselves, something insidious was beginning, the world was changing in ways that no one could see yet, but nothing would ever be the same, and no one would remain untouched for long. For now, he was blissfully unaware, and in that tranquil ignorance everything went on as it had day after day.

            He used his identification badge to disengage the locking mechanism for the door rather than go through the trouble of pulling his keychain from his pocket, and as he opened it, he asked, “So, what are we going to be watching tonight?”

            She turned towards him where she was sitting, a smile stealing across her face. “I do have the first season of Beverly Hills 90210 with me on DVD; we could start with that and go from there,” he replied before turning back to the television, her smile transforming into a devious smirk as she did so.

            He couldn’t mask the look of disdain that immediately spread across his features, and clearly she wasn’t oblivious to his natural response to her flippant suggestion either. Without looking up from the sofa where she was still grinning she muttered just loud enough for him to hear her with a mocking pout to her tone, “Don’t judge me.”

            “I would never dare,” he replied, his tone one of mocking apology to match her own.

            “I could feel you judging me, your judgmental eyes boring a hole into me. Don’t try to deny it,” she said in her typical deadpan manner.

            The television displayed some animated program, the product of equal parts surrealism and the counter-culture desire to cross the line into poor taste and offensiveness, more than likely a fair amount of drug use in the mix as well. It didn’t matter what was being broadcast though, not to him, it was only background noise. Only occasionally did conversation lapse and attention shift to the screen and what was being displayed upon it.

            “So, what are your thoughts on abortion?” she asked abruptly, after a period of silence. He was too accustomed to the seemingly random shifts in conversation to be taken aback by the sudden question arising without preamble; though he was a little bit curious as to whether there was some personal reason inspiring the query.

            “Well,” he replied, “personally, I’m sort of against it. But I don’t think that other people should be expected to see things the same way that I do.” He paused for a second, trying to frame his thoughts, hoping to put things together coherently. “I guess it just seems wrong to me when a person or a group of people tries to force other people to behave as if they believed the same things that the group in question does.

            “What about you?” he continued, “What is your opinion on the subject?”

            “I just don’t like the thought of having anyone tell me what I need to do when it concerns something so personal,” she responded. He nodded, realizing that there wouldn’t be any further elaboration from her on the subject unless he happened to push forward. His timidity won out over curiosity though, and he refrained from asking her if there was something specific that had led to that particular issue being on her mind.

            The conversation continued on from there, spanning the hours as the end of their respective shifts approached, as all of their conversations did.

            The specifics of their dialogue weren’t of the greatest importance to him or apparently to her, but the conversation and companionship were both comforting and frequently entertaining, even when a good deal of the discussion was of a fairly superficial nature.

            There she sat; fewer than three feet from him, sharing the sofa, at opposite ends, while all he could think about was how much he wished that she was closer than she was. They talked for hours, subjects dissolving into tangents, discursive and without discernable pattern. The whole while he just couldn’t stop himself from thinking about how much he wanted her to move closer to him, to make some sort of indication that she was looking at him in the same way that he couldn’t help but look at her, with desire and growing affection.

            He imagined that he caught glances from her now and again, suggestive of something kindred to his own impulses regarding her, but he couldn’t silence the fear that spoke up in his mind, insisting that he was just letting wishful thinking play cruel games with his mind. He didn’t dare go out on a limb and express his desires to her, for fear of losing these opportunities to share her company and to enjoy this torturous proximity, knowing that the risk was simply too great that she would take his advance as an offense. Because, no matter how excruciating it was for him to have her so close while plagued with this fear and uncertainty, it was still the single best part about his nights these days and the one thing he actively enjoyed about his job. These precious hours in her presence made the days spent looking forward to them more than worth his while.

            She appealed to him in so many ways, and he longed to express these things to her in some way that might somehow win her affection. With words or with actions, he didn’t care about the specific form that expression might take; he simply wanted to lay everything out on the table. It ran contrary to his nature that he was having such a difficult time keeping these thoughts bottled up inside. He wished that he could pride himself on his candor, his willingness to always let everyone around him know precisely where they stood with respect to him, but that was not who he was. He wanted nothing more than to be a more confident man, to be the sort of person who would never hesitate to share what was on their mind; yet, here he was, afraid to do so much as touch on the surface contours of what he found himself thinking of her.

            Within only the first couple of weeks that he’d worked with her, he felt a definite irresistible bond with Leyna. It wasn’t just that she was as attractive to him as she happened to be. Attraction alone was a common enough thing that it could easily be dismissed. There was something more beneath the surface, a barely perceived connection that he couldn’t reconcile with what he knew of life and relationships, even solely for himself.

            It wasn’t enough that she appeared to share some of his ideological leanings on the surface. Even combined with his intense physical attraction to her, these apparent ideological similarities would not be adequate to explain the sense of resonance that he felt whenever she was even remotely nearby.

            The earlier years of his college education provided him with ample means to try and describe how he felt, but nothing that he would ever dare to say out loud to her. Oppositional charged ions could not have experienced a pull as powerful as the force that seemed to draw his attention steadily toward her. The gravitational attraction of a singularity seemed like it must pale in comparison with the lure that she held over him. Even without her near he found himself focusing on her, remembering her face with vivid clarity when he closed his eyes, the sound of her voice. She existed within his thoughts with the same sort of concrete reality that she enjoyed in the real world that they shared.

            The concept of soul mates would cross his mind if he believed in the existence of the human soul. All that he knew for certain was that something mysterious, some impetus that he did not, and perhaps could not, understand was making her so enticing to him that it felt almost magnetic in nature.

            He didn’t know a lot about her really. The details of her life were primarily an unknown variable for him, but he was getting to know her better every time they had occasion to visit. He absorbed every new bit of information that she revealed with something approaching rapt pleasure.

            It was particularly pleasing to him when she made an off-hand comment later that night about being sexually deprived, assuaging his slight concerns that there had been a very good reason for her to have been thinking about abortion earlier on in the shift. Looking at her with a bit of puzzlement, he wondered how the hell that could even be possible. The look on her face as she had spoken was one of total sincerity.

            “You have sex,” he insisted, incredulity quite apparent in his tone.

            “No, really I don’t,” she replied with an ever so slight frown manifesting on her lips. “It’s kind of sad, actually.”

            “Oh really?” he asked sarcastically, assuming that she was being absurdly self-deprecating for some reason that he hadn’t yet discerned.

            “No one wants to get with this,” she said with a self-effacing grin as she gestured towards herself like she was on display, the mannerism and the words seeming to reinforce his presumption that she was joking, but there was something about the tone and the look in her eyes that implied a hint of sadness.

            He could never quite tell whether she was being sincere or facetious when she said things like that. He had to assume that her choice of wording was intended to imply sarcasm, but even if she was making a joke, he sometimes had to wonder how much of that humor was designed to provide a mask for feelings that weren’t altogether so far off from what she actually said. He knew enough about her by now to be confident in his belief that she didn’t have the most positive self-image, for whatever reason.

            She didn’t think that she was pretty, as she had stated once before. He found her to be magnificent, radiant even. He saw her so differently from how she appeared to imagine herself, their perceptions so diametrically opposed as to seem like they couldn’t possibly be describing the same thing.

            She was not only beautiful to him, but enthralling in a way that he couldn’t explain; something that held him captive like a siren would have in an ancient Greek myth. Yet he could never seem to tell her any of this, not without risking far more than he was willing to lose. It was a tragedy to him that he wasn’t able to share with her that he could guarantee that there was at least someone who definitely found her attractive.

            It really wasn’t just that he found her attractive though; there was something about her character that he admired. She had none of the difficulty expressing herself that he was experiencing where she was concerned. She could be stubbornly evasive and truly pigheaded about things that pertained to her, but she also had little difficulty when it came to speaking out when she felt there was a need to do so. He’d always felt more comfortable in the background, remaining under the radar whenever it was possible to do so, but she was more than willing to make waves if she felt that that they were required.

            While he silently mused over earlier elements of the conversation, they continued to talk, his attention only marginally there.

            “I don’t think that she means to be condescending,” she explained, now discussing one of their superiors at the hospital, “but it pisses me off just the same when she comes across that way.”

            “Well, of course it does; no one likes to be talked down to,” he replied.

            “I’m going to have to say something to her, just to make her aware of it,” she decided, a determination that he probably would have neglected to make.

            His attention drifted again as he watched her lips forming words, as her tongue subtly moistened them at irregular intervals. He watched those supple lips part as breath exhaled, and he longed to feel that breath against the sensitive flesh of his neck, the texture of those lips against his own as the pressure behind them increased. He yearned for the sensation of her lips parting, and her tongue brushing against his lips as it slid between them. He wondered if it would feel as exquisitely beautiful as it did in his imagination.

            He knew that he really should say something to her, that he shouldn’t just sit her petrified by fear. Sooner or later these visits would end, and inevitably there would come a time when he may very well never see her again. Any possibility, no matter how remote it might be, of reciprocation would then disappear. By then it would be too late; all of those probabilities that he considered, whether high or low, would have collapsed to zero. Even knowing all of this, he just couldn’t bring himself to act. He could rationalize it to himself, saying that if she interpreted it wrong, he could end up losing his job. But he knew that she would never take things that far, even if she weren’t able to return his attraction, which was just another small thread in the tapestry of what made her so beautiful to him.

            He sat there wondering why she couldn’t take the initiative and provide him with some sort of clue if he was right in suspecting that maybe there was something mutual, an advance that was unmistakable for anything but attraction to him. Of course it was always possible that she really just wasn’t interested at all, in which case it made perfect sense that she wasn’t showing any overt interest. But maybe, he told himself over and over again, just maybe she was simply as afraid of rejection as he was. He knew that, giving himself flimsy, poorly thought out excuses to keep his hopes up was unhealthy. As long as he could conceivably think that there was even a marginal chance of her feeling the same way as he did, he could avoid beginning the painful process of coming to terms with the fact that this infatuation of his was a dead end street.

            The night came to an end sooner than he would have liked, they always seemed to, and they once again went their separate ways. He saw their parting as an almost physically painful thing while fairly certain that, to her, it was just the end of another day.

            He dreaded the passage of the next few days, the intervening period of time before he would again share her company. He knew with confidence that she would be on his mind far more frequently than was truly reasonable. He was aware, with utmost clarity, that he probably wouldn’t cross her mind at all. He accepted that, but still he hoped that he was wrong. If he thought prayer was anything more than masturbatory, self-indulgent activity, he would be praying that she couldn’t shake him from her thoughts the entire time that they were apart. But if he were a gambling man, he wouldn’t take odds on that ever being the case.

            He walked slowly out to the parking lot, unlocking his car by remote when he was still a dozen feet distant. He slid behind the wheel, rotated the key in the ignition, and drove away from the facility. His final thoughts as he left the parking lot were about whether he could find some reasonable sounding justification for showing up that weekend when he knew that she would be there. He dismissed the thoughts immediately as being more befitting a stalker than a potential romantic partner, and he knew that he was flattering himself with just the internal suggestion of that potential being real anywhere outside of his imagination.

            The sunrise was beautiful, if not a little bit of an annoyance when he was forced to travel directly into the glare that it produced. The clouds from the thunderstorm the night before had obviously started to dissipate sometime during the night while he was entirely and intently focused on something else.

            The long hours spent in the common room shared between their two respective wards had been enough to usher in a new dawn while he remained totally oblivious to the passage of his time.

            The world was washed clean for a brief period of time by the storm that had raged through the evening before and into the beginning of the early morning hours. It never stayed clean for long though, and even the temporary interval of rain-induced cleanliness was illusory in nature. Nothing had actually changed.

            Nothing ever really changed, or so he thought. If only he were right, because the changes that were coming were something that he could never have imagined in even his most feverish nightmare.

            His morning drive from the hospital grounds to his one-bedroom apartment was always a chance for him to unwind, to let his mind wander towards a center, a place of emptiness, somewhere subdued and without pressure. It just seemed like more and more often that place of peace and internal sanctuary was more difficult to reach after the nights that he spent with her. Everywhere that his mind would turn, seeking peace, there she was.

Written April 5th, 2011

I claw at the shadows cast by a me that could have been.
Desperately trying to catch up to where I know I should be now.
I see him in the mirrors when the lights are low enough.
But I can never step through that divide and into his shoes.
I'm chasing the wake left behind by a better man than me.
Will I ever catch up to where I'm supposed to be?
I see him in the reflections in your eyes sometimes.
Is it really me that you love, or is it the trace of him within?
Will there ever come a time when the two of us are the same?
I'm trying so hard, as much for you as for myself.
I don't know if all that effort will amount to anything.
For you I keep on crawling forward.
I do everything for you.

Written April 6th, 2011

All my life I felt like I was waiting for something.
Like a pressure building in the back of my mind
I thought that it would be the end of the world.
I watched and waited all these years for some sort of sign.
My eyes were always searching in the wrong places.
I thought it was the end, but it was always you.
I sat here hoping to witness the world burned away.
Instead it was the end of everything I believed was true.
You brought me to my knees like no one else could.
My mind is spinning every time I look your way.
I'm broken down, confused, and scared to death.
But somehow I know that you are here to stay.
You're the death of who I knew myself to be.
All of my illusions dissipate with you right here.
I've become a stranger to myself, someone new.
I am desperate to believe you, telling me to have no fear.