It's been weeks and I still can't forget.

Let me paint a picture in your mind. She's sitting at the corner table, alone, holding a cup of tea to her lips. She's wearing that pink coat, the one with the brown band that runs across the chest and back, around the upper arms. She's in her glasses, and behind them, her eyes are vacant. She's dead.

You walk by and time slows down. The table has all her books, her food, her stuff. her backpack is by her twined ankles. She's there. So present in physical form.

And you want to hurt her for it.

But you don't. Not this time. Because you're older now. Older, slower. Wiser, maybe, and more treacherous certainly.

But what really stops you from doing anything is the pain on your palm. Ghost pain because it doesn't even hurt now when you touch it. You've begun to forget. Pain doesn't matter anymore when you can't feel it.

If you gave your palm to a nonbeliever, he'd never find proof. It's all healed, even to you, who knows what to look for. Where to look. The only difference is texture. Scar tissue so well disguised as to be invisible.

One day you want to see him again and hold out your hand. Maybe smile. And ask, where's the proof we knew each other? You don't know me.

Maybe you never did.

Laugh, because in that moment, you want the past eight months to have never been. You want to close your eyes and wish it all away so the things that have changed you don't exist anymore. You want to be unbroken, again.

You want your life back, and all the self-hatred to just go the fuck away. You want to dance again, alone in the darkness and not feel the hands of some stranger like waking nightmares against your skin.

You want to kiss again where the taste of ash does not invade your mouth like a burned down house. You want to be free again, of your skin and the constraints of reality. You want to go back in time where The Outside was the most beautiful aspect of the world. When people where magical creatures. Where belief and faith could move mountains and passing doubt only made grassy hills.

When he touches your hand and looks, with fingers that trace the palm, you'll dissociate for an instant, long enough to see the sky black again, long enough to protect yourself because hands mean hurt. And when he lets go of your hand, asks what's wrong, you'll step back, step away and wish you had it in yourself to ask for help and healing but you won't, because he didn't want you dependent on him at all.

He wanted you free when all you wanted was chains. And now that the chains have been forcibly attached by another memory, you won't ask him to help you escape. You've learned. You know you can't trust him.

You gave up the wrong bits of yourself, until you were warped beyond recognition, and he called it flattery to his ego. Said he was insecure. You believed him, back then. Over time, though, you've come to realize that steel has no insecurities. Just many forms, no feelings. None compatible with your own.

You learned too late, maybe.

Or maybe soon enough, since you learned before you saw him again. Since someone else saw fit to teach you. Miserable, dependent idiot. You let it happen. You wanted to feel again. You wanted to be important again, to anyone.

You fell in love with your own mental anguish and that's why you let yourself be destroyed. You are a useless, despicable, pathetic excuse for a human being. You wanted to be destroyed, but you forgot that there's no such thing as a serving size of agony.

When you see him again, and you're laughing, leaning out over the pier, you'll be looking into the water, wishing you didn't know how to swim. All around you, prisons. Dry land, water, air. And you will never escape.

He won't know. He won't realize, and for old time's sake, for idiotic reasons of your own, you'll let yourself become less by letting him touch you. Arm around shoulders. Hand at hip. A kiss on the lips.. Maybe you'll even let him fuck you again, since it's been that long.

Except it hasn't, and you'll close your eyes - or turn the lights out - so you can imagine being safely somewhere else in your mind. So he won't see you cry when you recall how other hands did the same when you couldn't move.

And probably it'll be different, so you won't have the burn of the carpet against your face and chest. You won't inhale the dust bunnies and the old sock smell of a different floor. You won't have to remember as vividly as you do now.

It will hurt. Maybe that'll be enough to explain when you can't hold back tears since you know "so happy to se you" won't work. Maybe "so happy for the reminder I'm no longer human" will. Maybe he'll stop long enough to kiss the back of your neck, and you can wish for the end of the world to appear.

Out on the pier, you hang onto the railing like it can save you. You wait until the silence hurts and then you turn to the boy-man you loved - still love - and you lie as hard as you can that things have changed. That you are someone else now, and things won't work. Because if you can't be dependent in a normal way, you'll turn him into a constant source of pain, until the day when you can forget everything and jump.