How long had it been since I last felt it? That euphoria? I’d used to see her like an angel–a blank page unwritten and untainted–with a jolt that’d send my toes curling and lips chattering mad.

But now, these are forgotten memories. They seem like a dream that is unreal; or maybe it was my perspective of my darling.

I am a cold shell where the tingle of security has not comforted me in quite a while. When we sit in bed, sure we were close, but the hands combing through my hair didn’t carry the same innocence and tenderness they did thirty years ago. They were brisk and rough, almost like a routine.

I miss the moments when she did love me, where our hearts would combine into a flourishing pit of uncertainty. Our love would sing, plucking our souls like fine tuning an instrument. We would rejoice together when good befell upon us, and would pray for the better when times were hard.

Where did I go wrong? Is it simply that I cannot understand the complexity of my endeavouring wife? Am I simply a late bloomer?

As I kiss her to bed, I ask myself this:

How long will our love stay away from us?

And somewhere, in the back of my broken mind, a tiny cry would reply to me, comforting me, assuring me that it would return to us. I, unfortunately, did not believe it.

One night, however, when we were reading sections of Vicinity, something different occurred.

My wife looked at me with bags under her eyes. Her sullen features were illuminated oddly in the light.

“What is a perfect world?” she asked.

“Hm…?” I had barely caught up with what she was saying before she spoke again.

“Is it a world in which I don’t exist?”

This time I understood what she was saying. I pondered this myself, sitting in dead silence.

“In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to say goodbye to each other.”

We never saw the next day. We were too old to continue on, suffering without love.