Marshall…

It's been so long since I cried for you. I used to think of you all the time, you had been my world and back then I wasn't sure I could go on. How could I live without you? It hadn't seemed possible. I'd cried so much then my tears were like acid, burning the raw flesh, salt into open wounds. I'd thought about leaving, you know. It would have been easy and we could have been together.

Suicide, the easy option, had it been yours? I'd have gone happily, I already felt dead. Left behind this bitter, loveless world. To join you in paradise, the other side of hell like you always said. Paradise lies just over there, just past life and all the pain we must endure. I'd have swallowed those pills, just like you did, just another pill to take the pain away, just another to take the life away.

It seemed so easy; I don't know what stopped me. We'd always done everything together, taken each tentative step in life, each stride towards death. How could you go alone? Leaving me here. I was alone, and all I wanted was to be with you. I remembered when we were younger, you'd always said, you'd always be there for me. It was the hard way I learned that the dead make promises they can never keep.

Weeks, months past, I wandered the ether with your ghost, with my memories. The world scraped by regardless. I was like a ghost myself, I didn't care anymore, what was there left here worth experiencing without you? But with time, my memories, like scars faded slowly, I felt empty, and I still wanted you. But I couldn't seem to remember you.

I came back to your grave yesterday. The stone is weathered now, the flowers long gone. Dead like the memories that were once so vivid it hurt. I sat for hours, my back leaning against your name. I wanted you to be here, but you weren't. I wondered what it would be like to die here.

I nearly never came home. I wanted to stay with you forever, I wanted to leave again, and I wanted to find you. It was as I lay, soaking up the sun over your grave that I yearned for you and I knew it would still be easy to leave. I'd walked this path for years now, close to the edge, the brink of my own destruction. I knew it would never take much to send me that way.

I often dreamt of my own death, how it would feel. To be numb again, to know that when I closed my eyes, it would be the last time. That I would never have to wake up to this world, that when I came around, you'd be there. Waiting for me, like you always were. It was a fantasy I ached to fulfil.

The pills lie near me now, as I write this, they look beautiful. I know they can end it for me, and I know that I can find you again. I was never the same without you, but at least I can know that although we may not have parted together, our deaths will be the same. See you on the flipside.

- V xxx

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