"Is it over yet?" you asked, slowly pulling your hands back for a peek.
"Not just yet", I said softly, the blood still running down our leg. And I wished I could still feel it, the way I could as a child. The numbness I'd sought for so long, giving up every ounce of faith that I had once desperately grasped for, has become a deeper emptiness than I'd known was possible, and the source of a perpetual panic attack.
"It doesn't hurt", I said with a tinge of disappointment that was more reassuring to you than it would ever be for me.
"What's wrong?" the question that was perpetually on your lips, and I wished for once that your concern wasn't such an annoyance. But at least, for once, it wasn't without reason.
Forever isn't something that one can manifest into some physical form, and all the blood in the world only demonstrates that impossibility. And yet that's a promise that you go to bed every night hoping for. It used to be so easy, promising you something that I seemed readily capable of giving. But everything has been an impossibility lately, I'm leaving long before you, a fact that you will never accept. And I have nothing to leave you.
"The difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer" (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray).