These nights as they were.

Remember when we used to write ourselves to sleep at night?  And managed somehow not to fall again awake?  How our eyes stayed closed, all night, and we never had to try to remember how feeling so, felt.

It's hard for me to remember now.  Now that you're not here to remind me.  And by 'you', maybe I mean 'me', the way I used to be.

I watched an old YouTube video I'd made of myself, for M., singing to him on his birthday in 2009.  God I looked young.  And happy!  Deliriously so, back before I knew any other way to be -- except vicariously.  Such a bizarre peek into my own once-mind; once-energy; once-unrecognized fate.

Tonight one of your songs came through my headphones.  Although it's always been there, all this time, it suddenly appeared as though lost for ages.  Indeed, it had been, somehow.  Lost amongst and amidst and underneath the many-blanketed boundaries of far less dangerous songs.  And I heard it again.  Tore into me briefly; too easily; still familiar.  Before the numb set in again.

And it was like I realized for the first time how thick that blanket has become; how unavoidable. How indistinguishable.  Only in contrast with a context that used to drench me in my own tears, could I see it as something separate from myself.  Something I've not become, so much as am covered by.  Perhaps shielded.  Perhaps shrouded.  As one would shroud the newly dead, as though not wishing that one to see.  To see its own cessation.

But so as not to leave it there...

-L (9/9/13)