War.

Earl has been snugglier more so lately than he usually is. I'm pretty sure he can sense the feeling that's welled up inside me. The overarching pronunciation of tremendous loss that seems to punctuate each breath I take. Ah, sometimes life is such a treacherous choice. The hope you cling to is the anchor that drags you into the depths of despair. I've been so careful with my choices lately that I am surprised your memory snuck back in. It was gone for awhile, and it felt peaceful to forget you. 

It's silly how the mind plays such tricks on the heart. It makes anyone and anything crucial, like oxygen, to the pumping of blood through the vessels, until the heart is so reliant on those memories that it doesn't remember how to function without them. The mind pretends the heart feels and sees and hears and breathes and it pumps in every thought of you, cycling your very existence throughout every limb until you're entwined in every organ and cell and fiber of my being. And the heart foolishly goes along with the game until it doesn't recognize fact from fiction and believes it truly will stop beating if you no longer exist. And to the mind, you're just a whisper of an echo of a moment in time. But the heart, afraid of stopping, beats even more furiously for you. And so the mind, remorseful for its wicked game, gently reminds the heart that you are gone. And the heart, so used to feeling and seeing and hearing and breathing you, begs to just stop beating. Because it can't, it won't, it shouldn't go on. Except, unwillingly, it must. And soon the blood that rushes through, fills every organ and cell and fiber of my being with the beating echo of emptiness. That's when the mind, lost in despair, promises the heart it won't ever trick it into beating for someone else again. But they both know that that's what the heart lives for. And the mind? She was never one to keep her promises.