I have no right to be angry if her heart's never been mine, but instead stitched into my palm as it beats, screaming, calling out for its rightful owner as my attempts at keeping her here are drowned out with something as simple as a jerk away from holding hands or the slam of a door. She's gone, submerged in the world where I don't exist, although I'm mere feet away and the only barrier separating our aching souls is a wooden door. She doesn't see me; she doesn't see anyone anymore. This is my own personalised torture. I watch as the woman I call my wife deteriorates into a sobbing mess that I no longer have the power to soothe, my once calming touch burning her fragile skin that has become sunken with the lack of proper nutrition. I can't console her, nor can I comfort her or hold her. I can't promise that I can protect her; I can't even say that everything will be okay. My efforts go unnoticed as I try to keep us afloat, helplessly submerging myself because I can't bear to see her fight it alone. She's asphyxiated by her own inescapable guilt when I should be the one grieving the loss of our once bountiful love. However, I doubt that it was I whom she loved at all. She had played the act, said the words, performed beautifully until her stage toppled beneath her. The memories that are burnt into my memory with as much emotion that accompanied their very days are little to her, or magnified by a different view. She never saw me; no, she was seeing who she was meant to be wrapping her arms around, kissing with a gentleness I didn't know existed until the first time our lips met. I had given her everything that I was in return, and I was met with the faint ghost of what she wished she could have given. I can see what she wanted now, and even I beg whatever merciless being is sitting atop his throne in the sky for her prayers, so unlike mine, which had been laced with desperation and sorrow, the brokenhearted pleas of a woman gone mad, to be answered. I, the one who should hate her, but only hate myself for being a witness to this suffering and little more, can only offer my body in hopes that she will replace the hands that are so different from the ones she'd held as the colour in them faded to white, and somehow find solace in imagining that I am the one she loves. It has been five years since Tegan died and Sara has never been the same. We have all the reason to divorce - the flames have been doused, the cracks never mended, and her pain has never ebbed - but she remains out of her own will, out of piteous dereliction for reminding me each night, as her lips shake with the power of her screams and spell out the name she never lets me hear, her hands gripping me like she could possibly rip her sister from the heavens she is surely watching us from, that I will never be what she's looking for. I stay, although she is sure to leave me in the morning, when the sun by the window reveals her true form, curled under blankets as she sobs. Sometimes she would scream, or wait until I take a shower or leave the room to abandon her side of the bed in hopes of clutching onto the scent that we've washed away with our own failed attempts at hiding out from misery. She doesn't think I notice when she changes the sheets every Monday in hopes of reviving the warmth that drained out of the same body that had once taken to those sheets with the woman that stole my heart. She doesn't think I notice when she slips half of her dinner into the trash she keeps by the bed in case she's roused from the chilling nightmares that crawl up her spine and force her to eject what little food she has in her system. She doesn't think I notice, but I do. I walk with her hand in hand to the grave adorned with the brown leather jacket, wait just out of hearing range as she repeats the words that would have shook the Earth to its very core if the angels in heaven had decided not to cry on the same day each year, as the cars drive by, oblivious to the world she's created for herself just to see you again. 'Please,' she begs, 'come back.'