I don’t know.  A transition period?  The next stage?  So, is the last era complete?  The journey finally finished?  I guess in many ways it isn’t an end at all; it’s a start, but not a fresh one.  Okay, maybe it’s not a new beginning either; just the same middle with a drastically different player.  I don’t know, I don’t understand it yet.

She was a relatively small lesion, when compared with the legends of others, but it was not as much her size and shape as her placement and timing.  And she was so blue, so sad – so in need of one happy breath to change her color.  She had the tiniest, deadliest, plague and I tried to help.  She can’t fault me for that.  I gave and I gave until I nearly died searching for her contentment.  Even the illusion of relationship tranquility would have sufficed in placating our one shockingly non-salacious necessity.  Instead her persistent pullulating pressure led to my nightmares, night sweats, late nights, and nefarious nightly nastiness.   I jumped at each and every opportunity to correct, what I perceived to be, the caustic cancer we shared.  Trust me, I seized the day.  I seized many, many nights as well.

Our problems were rooted too deeply for superficial strategies. I only became aware of said problem’s sadistic side effects in recent months, but certain life long symptoms should have clued me into the inevitability of the relationship’s combustion.  Her spooky specter must have always shadowed me, guiding my thoughts… sigh, the seeds of our climax were sown so long ago.  My mind’s puzzling tilt is a perfect example.  Grade school through University, I never seemed to approach projects, problems, or pleasantries like my peers.  In some cases my methods weren’t just different, my answers, even, were drastically contrary to everyone else’s interpretation of the constitution of a solution.  She and I obviously grew together, merged around one another; two adjacent pieces of an organic jigsaw puzzle.  Her manner didn’t just mold my own, it justified and rationalized my existence.  She was the perfect vulnerability, detrimental yet indispensable, divinely devastating – to me, to many I’ve known, and in beauty.  She made me, I made her, and we destroyed each other; now here I am today, not better, not worse, just less.

I didn’t want to excise her with a gruesome surgery.  Who would it make me?  What would it change?  I, like any man, feared the dark void of her absence and the horrifying hollow in my head.  All these years she’d kept me away from reality TV, from an obsession with ‘societal status’, and from whatever entrenched urge drives people towards permanent companionship.  She kept me a stranger in the modern western world and kept my opinion of its entertainment as little more than equivalently modern mundaneness.   Thank you sweetie…

But I literally hadn’t known deep sleep since last summer.  I had practically become asexual and I hadn’t leaked an ounce of creativity in months.  She was eating me from the inside out, rotting all our wonderful work, and growing too fast for me to compensate appropriately.  I was finally crossing the threshold from quirky human to desolate zombie – no longer capable of even privately expressing my individuality or reveling in its weirdness.  I was forced, for the both of us, to finally annihilate her.  I had her decapitated and drained.  Ripped apart and exposed.  I tossed her aside and, as I feared, she took a piece of the best of me with her.  She’s half of what she became with me, and neither of us will ever be the same.

Now, with my perceptions altered, with my head shaved, with my body wrecked, I should probably honor the karmic lesson of our tragedy:  Fuck over, and fuck, enough women and they’ll eventually rip out part of your brain.  Instead, however, I’m going to honor a lesson she taught me before the scales tipped: Only a putrid pussy would allow retribution to sway his actions…  like I’d ever, even in my current crippled condition, let fate have an influence on MY decision-making!  I’d rather have an adventurous, uninhibited, unbridled year of Angelo De La Vega than a lifetime of a boring, frugal, conforming “man” who simply survives while envying the excitement of others.  He floats through his twenties on his back with a life vest and sun screen – I’m deep sea diving, naked, with the bloody head of the dog he walks twice a day tied around my neck, and a reef full of hungry sharks snapping at my toes.  I’d rather have someone kick my balls than join his kickball league… asshole.  I’d fantasize fucking a felled French fetus before fucking with Fantasy Football; he spends his time memorizing the stats of amazingly athletic men and worshipping their amazing gifts when he could have finally untied the knot in his dick and put it to amazing use.

I can’t pinpoint exactly what she dragged out of my consciousness, I can’t figure out exactly what’s changed, but I’ll die before I let that shit slow me down. Some minor and major mannerisms may have mutated, however our mission and its meaning remain exactly the same:  What is a man but the sum of his stories?  My compass may generally lean off the moral bearing, although it’s almost always, ultimately, to the benefit of those involved…  their moment of significance, of danger, of chaos.  They obtain a memory powerful enough to produce a smile many years from now while they rock back and forth in their chair at a nursing home; a memory worth keeping; a memory appropriate for the invaluable space of the mind; an uncharacteristic burst of adrenaline in their life of monotonous linearity.

Don’t worry my love – I won’t stop what you started.  I promise.  Perhaps this isn’t even the conclusion of our tale, perhaps one day you’ll return to finish the job, perhaps you’re still the end of my story.  Bring it Bitch.