Disclaimer: Well, they aren't mine. All I can lay claim to are some pretty shoes...

AN: I should be finishing Illusions of Bliss, but my muse is making me suffer on that one and this popped out with no place in that story so, here it is, in it's random madness and solitude.

I was in the middle of a crowd when I saw her, crushed, stifled and warring, unsuccessfully against the force of the masses.

Saw her.

Such a simple phrase. Much too concise, too uncharitable and such a succinct word to capture what I felt and experienced when I set eyes on her after seven long years. I saw, I drowned, I soared, I plummeted, I exploded… I lived a lifetime in the seconds that she entered my vision. It seemed as if even the unrelenting tempest of the scrambling swarm around me had allowed a moment's pause to drink her in.

And then she was gone.

Again.

I had lost her so many times. Too many to count. Or rather, enough that I was forced to stop counting.

I shouldn't have. Lost her at all. Or at least stopped counting.

I had spent many nights formulating what I would do if I had the fortune to see her again.

Fortune.

It sounds like it should be magical, effervescent, out of my control - or hers - but of course, that is only something my brain conjured up as a cushion to soften the blow of the harshness that is all too apparent to everyone including me - I could have changed this. At any time. Even now. But when the time came - comes - I couldn't even take a single step towards her.

What was waiting there? Ghosts. Regret. Scars that can never be healed.

It's funny how time can give you perspective.

Perspective.

Also a word that doesn't live up to my reality right now. Perspective for me is more like a cold, hard, unforgiving punch to the gut. One that has left me winded and writhing in hatred of myself and my actions, wallowing somewhere between the bottomless pit of self loathing and reprehensible cowardice.

And for seven years that is how I have existed.

Moments... in mere moments, I have had the fortuity to forget it. Lost in the arms of another woman, frenzied in the haze of battle, sometimes feeling righteous in anger and hatred.

Yes, too often I found solace in hating her.

Once, in a particular minute of madness, I even made the mistake of uttering this aloud. And that simple tantrum lost me more than I could cope with after the black hole she had created. I forfeited the oasis I had created for myself in her absence, and those who tolerated it as such. In the end, many of them abandoned me on the tail of the truth - I had never found an oasis, only a mirage and they were no longer willing to play along.

And for that, I cannot fault them. I learned after several years of hating them and her alike, that the only person I truly hated was myself.

And it all started with her. Meeting her. Wanting her. Needing her. Losing her.

I needed her back.

Funny that I should frame my desideratum like that. As if I ever really had her.

I never did.

And, that, was the crux of it all.

Something that whispered horribly in the dark recesses of my mind for years, echoes again: that if I ever had her, I threw away any possibility to keep her a long time ago. And yet, I was unable to let that truth lie. I was in ruins, and this fact haunted me, danced manically around a life I wasted, taunting the barren landscape that I would be left to die in.

The truth hurts.

But the hurt is only the beginning. Afterwards, you bleed daily, the pain, like needles, slowly leeching the life from you, leaving just enough for you to remain conscious in the midst of the hell you have created for yourself.

Truth pulls reality from you like an acid might melt your skin, allowing you to remain... a pathetic husk experiencing a would-be life in a twisted fashion, but unable to feel it completely, and leaving you trembling in fear of what reality might think if it knew of the ugliness of your truth.

And that is my reality. Mangled, torn, decrepit and wanting...

Without her.

She used to be everything. She was such an unstoppable, unfathomable, unshakable force that drove me forwards that I almost forgot she was why-how I managed to keep going. She surged life into me with such hope and ferocity that I was propelled onwards with a powerful speed that left me no time to consider how or why, only the privilege to basque in the fruits of it all. It made me whole with a quiet kind of comfort. And in this - with this - I became the man I always wanted to be.

It took me too long to realise that. Damn her! She made me whole and then she took it all away. She took me away.

She made me feel so much. Much more than I was prepared for. And certainly more than I was prepared to let go…

She made me feel wonder, worry, curiosity, excitement, hope, confusion, jealousy, frustration... hell sometimes she made me angry, furious even. She also made me horribly sad and regretful at times, but aside from all of this, because all of this, she made me think, she made me understand. She grounded me.

Most importantly, she taught me love.

I had never loved something - someone - so absolutely as I did her, that I didn't understand it at first. It's strange when I think back now, to realise that the only thing that made me angry in our years together was her.

In the years before and after, I was angry at everything and everyone else.

And now, I haven't seen her in seven years and yet one flash of those blue eyes has already stolen all my anger and deflated me. Sometimes, there is just too much for time to erode. She is still laced in everything inside me and while it is hard to admit, I cannot and will not deny it now. I've always known this, deep down, so unwilling to face it, that is almost like a rebirth to acknowledge it here, mere meters from her. There is a little bit of her in everything that I do, of who I am. I imagine there always will be. Its the only part of myself I know, that I am sure of these days.

But, who is she, now? A lot can change in seven years. She also taught me that.

Standing beside her taught me how to live, loving her taught me how to lie, and living without her taught me how to die.

Right now, as I lose sight of her, I am again faced with a choice I cannot make peace with. Seeing her was unexpected, an event that has chased away all the sanity in me and her sudden disappearance creates a panic that my heart is fighting to atone for.

At least this time, I know the roads that lay ahead.

All that is left... is to choose.