And so you are my Taj Mahal. I admire you, love you, adore you, grow silent and breathless in your presence.

But at the end of the day, I must leave you where you stand; leave you to return to my other world where home is small, quaint, simple. I love both places but yours is forever intangible. I will always think of it with a wistful sigh in my heart, pine for it like a wolf baying at the moon, sometimes even dream about it.

But at the end of the day, no girl from Louisiana will ever live in the Taj Mahal. No wolf will ever call down the harvest moon. She must find happiness elsewhere: tangible, touchable happiness.

And so perhaps I have, but always will I love my Taj Mahal.

We sat there in that small kitchen, one of us in the light, the other in the dark. I asked him if he wanted something to eat. He says no. Silence. Finally he turns towards me, head tilted.

“It’s hard being like this, you know. Some days I don’t want to continue on. I feel like my world has been taken from me. But the last thing I remember …” His voice trails off as he looks upward, heaving a small sigh from his chest.

“It was last Februray, in New Orleans. The last thing I ever vividly remembering seeing was your hair before the blindness came completely. It was fire in the sun.” He takes a sip of water. More silence.

“Don’t ever stop being you,” he finally murmurs. “You’ll always be my fire in the sun.”

–

And this is my last memory of you, dear one, of our quiet moments together in that small pink kitchen which smelled of bleach and betrayal. You telling me you wished I was your daughter, that I should never change, that I was fire in the sun.

And I find myself content in this adoration for you, happy in this secret sort of love. I expound your graces to the stars, the moon, the rustle of the wind in the oak leaves.

You are a muse to my senses and I hope to have you be a part of my life for many seasons to come.

You’ve always purported turning Life’s lemons into lemonade was simple, but I’ll tell you this: you can’t turn lemons into lemonade if you never have sugar. Sugar is the key to all this. And Splenda, Equal, these things never suffice. It’s like putting a band-aid over a gushing aorta — you’re still going to bleed to death. The lemons will still be lemons.”

I sighed and looked up at the crescent moon hanging low in the sky, the stars glittering around it like lost diamonds in the night. “I feel as though I’m caught in a vicious cycle, you know? There’s no end in sight, no relief on the horizon. I want to be done. I want to be finished. I’m tired of swimming against the currents. Why not just let them win? Let them take me off into the dark oblivion? I hear the abyss is quiet … And maybe –maybe — there’s no bitterness there to plague my heart …”

Crickets chirped into the night, stars glimmering in the black sky.

“I just want to go home. I’ve never been so broken and alone as I am right now …” Her voice trailed off into the wind. “Please, just take me back home …“

But now we’ve passed into the veil of darkness. We make Time twist our world into a macabre visage. Gone are the days of the firefly, of diamonds in the winter sky.

“And I do wonder,” she said, “if I will live to know of the last polar bear to sink into the sea, drowning in the Arctic waters, if I will gaze upon the sunset of this civilisation. I wonder, indeed …”

Sometimes I miss you, though I’ll never say it to your face. You say you’re leaving, moving away. I nod and turn my head.

I hope you find happiness out there — I wish you the best. I hope the unease in your heart settles, that your demons are burned away.

I keep my scepticisms to myself. They have no place here, right now, marring the end of our days together.

I force a smile as I sit up, greeting the morning with a private aubade in my mind.

Once upon a time, we were in the dark. So it began. And we found light, we raced with it, danced with it, lived in it. But as it began, so it ends.

In the dark.

but now we must pack up every piece
of the life we used to love
just to keep ourselves
at least enough to carry on …

- Neutral Milk Hotel, “Holland 1945″

I find there’s an excitement brewing deep down as I quietly peek through the cracks at it with a childish curiosity, quietly contemplating to myself what it could all mean. The days start sliding by so fast with the force of an avalanche, racing to that point in time where the line takes a sharp turn off into another horizon.

And I must not — I cannot — hold on to the past, even though those days are now wrapped in a hazy, warm blanket of nostalgia. They’ve created yearnings, pinings, wishful thinkings for what once was. Regret is in the desire for change, the need for solace, the memorisation of the thousand “what-ifs” that plague your dreams when you sleep. And remorse? Regret that bored a hole through the heart, manifested into the soul.

How can it be that these things live in me? The girl who lived with no regrets, now in the heaving waves of a remorseful sea.

But I will remember this partially as the summer where I had one magnificent day with you, and even if it comes that this was our only day together for the rest of our lives, I’ll cherish it always.

And still I just can’t help but feel it wasn’t enough …

Nothing ever is.