He is handsome, yet he is dead. His eyes are twin, infinite, dark tunnels, tunnels leading to the netherworld of his void, his emptiness, the howling winds in the corridors that lead to nothing but a hole of mirrors, reflection upon reflection, and you in there reflection as well.

And the twinkle in his irises, that is also a reflection, a reflection of your tears, and his smile ruptures his face, tears your heart apart, and you are reduced to smithereens, a frozen, grimaced scream in a surrealistic nightmare that once used to be a dream, as you recall, ever so vaguely.

He is an absence, he is chaos, he is unadulterated anguish, he is your shattered fantasy, he is your shattered life. He craves love, he craves intimacy, oh so he says, but then he pushes you away, enraged by your presumptuousness in offering him both.

And he fears hurt, he dreads pain and rejection and abandonment, and so he hurts you first. He busts in your agony and in your writhing, writhing, writhing.

He preemptively rejects and abandons you, renders you transparent, ethereal, less and less real by the minute, and you dissolve, and you dissolve in his distracted, faraway gaze, as he contemplates your insignificance, and your heart is broken, and your mind is splintered.

You shrivel like a plant as you inhale the toxic fumes of his non-being, his despondent and hopeless darkness, a miasmatic emanation, a life rejected, a night without dawn in his sunless, arctic days, in his cancer, circle of cancer.

And so frozen, frozen to your bones, to your marrow, to your essence, you shiver involuntarily and uncontrollably, his tremors, his earthquake in you, the aftershocks.

And the relationship with him, you know, you know it well, is a form of self-harm, self-mutilation, and yet, and yet, you cannot let go. He is death. He is demise by a thousand invisible paper cuts, and you are become eruptive, infuriated scar tissue.

You are a wound where a person used to exist.

Sometimes, and that’s the reason that you’re staying, sometimes he is an ephemeral little child, hearing lacrimos from behind the wall of torment that passes for his soul.

One eye, one eye behind the corner, the corner of your relationship.

Sometimes, sometimes, beautiful times, precious times, he is all hugs, all tender need, cuddling, and tucking in, and cheeks, and laughs, and the good times, and the good times of apparent love, and you fall for it, you want it so badly.

He wants it so badly.

So, you both acquiesce, and you both cooperate, and you both collaborate, and you both collude in this conspiracy, and it’s not a theory.

And then he’s gone. This moment recedes, remits, reverts, relapses. It’s a shape-shifting and pregnant cloud behind the event horizon of his devouring black hole.

And he is penumbral. He is fleeting, he is an apparition, a remembrance of things past, the crumbling sepia dust of what could have been, the promise unkempt, unkempt.

It’s an eerie, disembodied, dismembered dance, the music wafting, your former selves entwined.

And on and on you go, as the night wears thin, and the day refuses to embark.