Right now in the Arctic Circle, it is twilight. The sun has hidden from the vast fields of snow, and it will not return for months and months. Not for all the love in the world. No kiss can conjure it. No hug can replace its warmth. No secret whisper or extended hand or careful laugh can reverse the orbit or adjust the tilt of a rock hurling through space at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour.

I am frozen, my love. I can no longer see the light. The months stretch out like an abyss before me; a semester's worth of sorrow. You cannot save me, no matter how sweetly you try or how desperately I want you to succeed.

We cannot fight the sun, my love. So let me go.

Time and space will never stop
But you and I will never grow
All things must slow
All things must slow

The heat of passion breaks my heart
All things break and all things fold

A noble end to a messy start
All things must go
All things must go

First: An absence. An emptiness. A brief abandonment. He left us, but only for a week or so. I cried in my mother's bed.

And I hated myself for it for months.

Second: The warmth of skin to skin contact when I rubbed my head against a friend's neck I now hate. A cat-like comfort I will never get back.

Third: That **** song that sometimes comes on shuffle that I don't remember until it's chorus punches me in the gut. The memory of your long hair forming a tent around me as you kissed my lips. Now my hair is long, and you are long long gone. It plays on.

Fourth: All the times I made my mother cry.

I was a cruel child; always picking and prodding at everyone's difference. And failing to hide my own. Pain to cover pain. More tears shed than I can count.

Fifth: Various childhood oddities. Not even the gay ones. The way I talked weird and ****** wrong and jealously attached myself to people who were indifferent. But I was indifferent too.

Or maybe I became that way.

What fools we are-- so desperate in our need to belong. Clawing at any scrap of affection. But then, hurt again and again and again. Until the very thing that we most crave becomes the thing that we despise. And hide. And bury in therapy and poetry and song.

Maybe I've tried to forget. But they've been with me all along.

I'm a little rusty on the incantation
That allowed you in my dreams
We just crossed paths in a different dimension
Now beg you please to leave

Caroline, what a sorry explanation
For a visit from the dead
The girl I knew is still halfway 'cross the nation
The girl I liked lives in my head

Visits from you have never been a good sign
That my life is going well
If I'm so desperate for a phantom's recreation
I'll walk backwards into hell

Caroline, what a sorry explanation
For a ghost of a best friend
We had it all and you threw it out the window
It's been five years since the end.

I'll admit that it is tempting
To accept the spell you've cast
Laughing, crying-- all the good times
But then why did it not last??

Caroline, what a sorry explanation
For a frauded history book
Five years ago we had a chance at reconciliation
If you ask me you're still a crook

This dim haven of the past,
Covered in cloth,
Like tired children playing ghosts
On Halloween
You won't be there.
Nor Christmas,
Or New Year's ever again.
But this dusty room will serve
As a coffin for your memory.
That chair and lumpy sofa
Will haunt me more than a spirit could--
With its raw physicality,
Thinly veiled
With greying sheets.

I love you
Long after your last breath.