I hadn't moved in millennia. My lips hadn't uttered a syllable in decades. My mind hasn't been able to configure a rational thought in a life time.

I didn't know much. I knew I was huddled in the corner of an abandoned bedroom in some multiple-family home. I was distantly aware of the commencing of another regular day in a struggling Latin home.

On some impulse, my eyes slowly wandered around the room. It was particularly … grotesque. There were several broken bottles of liquor littering the sheet less bed and cracked night stand. The stains on the wall were dingy yellow, obvious remnants of tobacco smoke. My eyes, always cautious to not too brutally disrupt my fragile existence, carefully drifted to the ground, where I saw littering the ground scattered cocaine grains.

And of course, my vague thoughts were suddenly sharp in focus; they were directed toward … her.

She was always present of course, always in my thoughts – the gentle blush creeping up her loving face, the exact shape of her full lips when she smiled, the intense emotion in her eyes and the deep wisdom present there that was forever hidden from me – but those were memories. The only source of my every comfort and every pain, the only thing of my past that I truly cherished and, at the same time, wished to be able to take back.

But this was different. An urgent voice in the back of my head told me, "This is important, snap out of your morose remembrances and pay attention."

I sat up slightly straighter and forced my numb mind to work faster because just as I was sitting here, hidden in some strangers destroyed bedroom, she was some where too. And I had no idea how she was.

I didn't know which would be a worse truth: her wallowing in self hate and agonizingly clear hindsight identical to me or her having no … disturbance over my leaving.

I knew the latter was what I really wanted and frantically needed, but I knew that wasn't necessarily the case. She could be some where, in a place relative to my surroundings, but she could be the one destroying the room, not pondering how it came to its sorry state. She could be the doing the drugs, not looking at empty pill canisters and abandoned substances, pitying the poor soul who had needed them.

If those same pharmaceuticals had any affect of my disgusting solid frame, I would have sought out there solace a long time ago, but the thought of Bella – my body shuddered at the intense, stabbing pain I felt shock my system of consciously thinking her name and I had to repress the cry of strangled agony that accompanied it – Bella having to resort to that was … nearly too much to bear.

I had left to protect her, from all of the forces trying to hurt her and from myself. I had left, not to bask in the warm glow that was this torture, but so she could have a chance to walk in the sun, to have a first real kiss, to have children and be the adoring mother I knew she would be, to grow old, and to be human. I left so she could lead a good life and then when her time came, she could … die.

Much as I had convinced myself I could protect her and I didn't have to leave her, that we could be happy, I knew there was no point in even thinking that I would be able to willingly hold her hand and watch her leave me forever. I knew that, no matter what, I wouldn't be able to kiss her one last time and watch her draw her last breath.

I would change her; there was no other way around it.

If she was – I could hear my audible gulp – dying, there is no question in my mind of what would follow. Because the thought of her leaving me forever had been the thing that I was terrified the most of the moment I realized I loved her. The mental image of her eyes staring back at me, blank and lifeless, was the worst thought my mind could muster next to the knowledge that I was the cause of murdering them that way.

Yet, for all I knew, she could be there all ready. She could be cringing in a corner; drugs pumping threw her divine blood. She could be dying.

I was so distracted by my despairing thoughts that I was not aware of a small frame gingerly mounting the rotting steps to where I sat, until the thin door was swung open and I was face to with a pair of wide, brown eyes, silently boring into mine.