The cocaine called all night. I stood and faced down the temptation but I did not sleep. How could I sleep? This ache is stronger than any addiction cramp, than any physical pain, than any pain that lies in my ken. I do not have the words for it. Each beat of my heart pours more bloody anguish into my breast, and it burns like a fire across dry grassland: to look at one sees no fire, but the spark comes and inferno rises, consuming all.
I paced my room until my head span. I have tried to understand, to see, to piece together, to deduce. I see nothing, I understand less and my deductions crumble. I remember looking from my window, the skies opened and shed tears that I shall not ever feel the relief of. The darkness outside an echo of my empty soul.
I have always fought: against crime, against temptation... not only of cocaine. Thoughts of such times twist my lips into a smile, though my bitterness makes a grimace overlay it. But where is my prize? For all that I do--once it was "art for art's sake" but somewhere it all changed; somewhere I believe he became an essential part of me.
All that I have tried to escape I have fallen beneath, and I can no longer rise above these disturbing sentiments. A slave to my emotions, a broken logician trying to break his chains with the shackle of a drug's distractions.
Emotions are grit in the cogs of reasoning, and I carry a desert of sand in my mind.
I know I am angry, I feel the dull fire burning in me but at whom? At myself? At Mary? At Watson? I love him, the words I never believed I would consider, and I hate him for what he has done to me. But is it what I have done? Or do I hate myself for my impotency for allowing him to leave? I do not know, feel as though I don't know anything anymore.
I remember standing in the church, hearing the wedding march and awakening to see him standing at my shoulder. He glanced into my eyes and smiled before his eyes flicked behind him to watch his bride as she walked up the aisle, and time dissolved into treacle.
The words of the vicar seemed slurred, drawn out, as though for all his piety he saw none in the service he was conducting. His eyes were glazed and distant, flitting over the far wall, dipping occasionally to check his place in the book. He did not even deign to look them in the eye, as though he forecast no future happiness for them. Watson would have been angered, had he ever cast his eyes away from his bride.
I do.
How apt that she should dress in white, for joy, hope, perhaps love and purity. Whereas I was dressed in black: someone must have a sense of humour at least for this situation.
I have never had, and not held for eight years of dreams, revelling in our companionship, clutching to the closeness and the interest he has for my cases, and me.
For richer or poorer...from sharing rooms with a stranger to save money, to this unrequited love...for better, for worse...even weathering my frustration and my release in cocaine...in sickness and in health...through the torments of hell for deviantism...and ignoring the act of '62; my eyes ache for their unshed tears as my heart does the unventured words.
As much as I want to find in this collection of jaded fallacies a cause for my bitterness, I do not. This society that has little purpose for them but a legal shackle--and yet what I would do to partake in this exchange with him. Can I judge them, deride their endeavour for happiness as I often do criminals? Am I, a supposed champion of justice, now the villain of the piece?
With this ring I thee surrender.
For all I have lost today I retain my desires, memories and the dreams of what I shall now never have. Those, if not their subject, shall be mine forever.
They left the church a wedded couple, stealing all the light as they went. I came home in shadow to sit in darkness with my cold grief and this empty shell of a life. I have not seen him for two months now.
I gave him away on his wedding day; gave him to one who could never feel his true value, could never need him as I have done. As I do.