my careless contagion

  How such a rich forest of emotions grew up overnight, I'll never know. Without care and without tenderness, all around me it grew. It was like a scene from a movie, only it was real and I was in wonder. I was no jaded audience member whining about the CGI. It was as real as the pin-pricks of a freshly-picked rose's thorns. And just as easily as it sprang up, it cried out for water. The shallow roots of the tender plants weren't strong enough to hold them over until the next rain. The fields grew tired and wilted, cried out and died a drawn-out death.  I knew it was all too good to be true. Things like that don't happen to me. Love like that doesn't just come into my life. It was over before I realized it, before I even had a chance to enjoy it. It was almost like a dream, like I had simply imagined it. I was left with the things that had grown around me — trees almost as tall as the sky itself and undergrowth that was once flowering and beautiful — but they w...

If I let go of something that never belonged to me in the first place, is anything actually lost? If the woman I loved spread herself among the stars — big men, small men, and men in between — have I lost anything?  I loved her undeniably through my best years and through the worst of times. She was like a metronome in my heart, but one day that metronome stopped. That day was the end of forever.  I don't know when it happened, but it happened as sure as the sun and moon. She died in my heart, and at her own hand. She pierced me through so many times, all the blood ran out, and I was left standing but with the wind whistling through my veins. She kept me on like a sharecropper to work her fields as my mind escaped over the hills and into the woods a thousand times. And, one day, it became a reality. I was gone, and she was left holding my broken chains.  She always said she was afraid of "forever." Somehow, I got her to believe. When I put the ring (titanium, be...