I am forever swimming around, amidst this ocean world we call home. My limbs grow weak and weary as my eyes drift skyward in defeat. I remember how warm the earth felt, as I lived and breathed next to her beating heart. I remember enough to keep searching through an ocean of tears, raised to astronomical depths. My dreams offer solace, where I return to distant, faded times. Through trees entwined with cool autumn air, my sorrow is lured by fragrant, bittersweet memories. I am at home as much as my world and consciousness allow. I remember falling into the most beautiful lake I've ever experienced. She swallowed me whole, like a droplet, and I was enraptured and enwombed within her bliss. The lonely windswept desert sky of my soul was filled by her luminous stars and warmed by her sunlit radiance. I gazed downward in awe and saw it all reflected in the shimmering ripples dancing and playing about the surface. It appeared to me as real as the very wonders it was reflecting. I stepped forward to prove to no one and everyone that they were, by belief. For an aching instant I was betwixt the two and the summation. Confusion befell me and I fell through, only to realize I hadn't entered the lake, I had left it. With all of my remaining life I howled at the heavens and collapsed, like a star on the shores of my youth, as my life's breath wandered away from the home it had harbored. I have been drowning on dry land ever since.

I lay there, coital, for heaven knows how long. I felt eons ebb and flow in the spans of seconds. I lived as intently as I could in those endless instants, as the boredom of -after- droned on and on. The fires of my heart grew dim and became only the faintest embers of the roaring blaze they had once been. My limbs, heavy with the weight of the world, protested. I felt the longing of this life which slowly began to ease the agony in my heart. As I was gradually nursed back to health, knowledge of record and history tried desperately to fill the yawning, nauseous chasm of my soul. I began to know the deadpan search for freedom and forgetfulness, and I released the hold on my life. Though it still lurched, pained, in front of me, I just stared back with tired, vacant eyes as if watching the most fascinating of nothing. My mind drifted, only to be slammed back reluctantly, repeatedly, and painfully by those I vaguely remember knowing, as if from a different life and age. I try, in vain, to forgive and forget myself as I paste on those plaster smiles and strain to look levelly. I remember. I forget. I forget again. I remember less. I am saddened at the thought that I have forgotten. I am not who I used to be. Though it pained me so, I was never so real as those lonely, lost times of my undoing. I am torn asunder at the thought of losing forever that, which has changed my life eternally, and that which I fear in the depths of my soul will never be again. That, which has gifted me with more pain than I have ever known in all of my lives or all of the lives that I know through my own.

Who am I to ask this of you?