Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.

I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.

I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound.

The very idea excited me. I’d found a world that no one around me knew - a secret garden only I was allowed to enter. I felt elevated, lifted to another place of existence.

The details of stolen moments past and present threaten to undo him completely.

Everyone just keeps on disappearing. Some things just vanish, as if they were cut away. Others fade slowly into the mist.

Autumn finally arrived. And when it did, I came to a decision. Something had to give: I couldn’t keep on living like this.

But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself—as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself. And I just don’t have the confidence to win over that force in me.