I'll put my guard down for you...

He imagines giving up. No more peering through windows, mourning the loss of a life that could never again be his. No more hopeless desire. No more uncertain future. No more terror. Then he wakes up.

Now, it felt like every day a new oozing pustule of emotion came glopping out. One day it was a goopy mass of abandonment issues. Then there was the gelatinous muck of hyper-independence weighing down my proverbial galoshes. The steaming, writhing mass that was my identity crisis was particularly pungent some days. It had come to my attention the hard way that for years my coping mechanism had been to numb myself; turn my emotions off completely. Any that snuck through were instantly squashed under humor, deflection, or anger. A perfect plan, until that damn straw had hit the camel's stupid back.

Heart in the casket...

He is always a different man; a reinterpretation of the man he was yesterday, and the day before, and all the days he has lived. The past is gone, was always gone; it does not exist, except in memory, and what is memory but thought, a copy of perception, no less but no more replete with truth than any passing whim, fancy, or other agitation of the mind. And if it is actions, words, thoughts that define an individual, those definitions alter like the weather - if continuity and pattern are often discernible, so are chaos and sudden change. He is changing again.

And what a simple thought...

Everything I have become,, everything I will ever accomplish cannot compare to my most impressive feat: I have loved you, fiercely, and assiduously. With the very marrow inside my bones. So that when I die, they can crack them to find you there. So that when I die, they can open me up and see your name tattooed on the wall of my heart. So that when I die, my epitaph will neither commemorate who I was nor what I did, but will read: he loved. And loved. And loved. And so, I smile now, because that is no small thing.