It would seem the people who claim to know me best have a wildly tainted perception of me. Let me set the record straight for you.

Over the past few years I’ve watched two people I’ve loved since before I could walk – the two people free to show me kindness, compassion, and attention unbridled by any responsibility to be the conduit of evil necessity – die in slow motion. I watched the helplessness, the terror, flood their eyes behind thinly veiled masks of strength, humor, calm deliberation, etc. etc., and so on, and so forth.

Accentuated by the unspoken agreement* of those pained by the truth, *to scoop out thoughts of mortality from their minds like pulp and seed from a pumpkin – but shaky hands left thick mounds on their every surface; body language, tone of voice, subtly concealed twitches spliced into short films of forced facial expressions,

the shutter of a camera - the flutter of a hummingbird.

And like the cancer that would come to take them, it grew, with a malevolence so immense that only the tears that kept me conscious in the moonlight could counteract it, bring some sort ofbalance to this appalling display of psychological pitfalls.

I didn’t sleep.
And when I finally did, it came with the realization that what [those held hostage by the imminence of their own erosion], truly require is for the one’s nearest to find the distinction between acts of love, and further distraction from the most important fucking experience of their lives.

I felt selfish, heartless. 

Like a bystander who’s stagnancy enables the victimization of another, we all ignored them as twisted Jim Wreaper robbed them of their souls, .bit by .bit, byte by byte, grain by grain into girt. 

We aren’t bad people.
No one taught us how to carry that weight;  or maybe the fatal flaw was that they did…

Equipped with this stark epiphany, the cosmos placed before me a window into the horrors of which my words will assuredly fail to express.
A vessel, who’s ever_seemingly-innocent ChangeInState proved to be reflections of a life filled entirely with torment. 

Her name was Jessica,
and my heart sobs for the life she’s had thrust upon her. 

She never broke my heart, at least not in the way a woman breaks the heart of a man.

I watched an innocent little girl crawl, an ocean of red stretching behind her, the flow of which satisfied the law of action, equal-opposite reaction.