A/N: Today, the line between Erik's thoughts and my own is blurred. Heartbreak is not confined to the page, but to help draw out the poison, I write, so that perhaps some of the sadness can be wiped away with literature, formless as it is. Maybe something good can come of it.

Let me know what you think.

oOoOoOo

What do you do when your heart is breaking?

What do you do when you have given someone your heart, your soul, your mind, your music, all of the love in the world...and they have decided they do not want it? How can you ever move beyond that sense of total hollowness within yourself that threatens to consume you in blackness? How do you learn to live again?

I had given every inch of myself over to hoping and dreaming, begging to be wanted by the sole person in the world that mattered, to be shown kindness and light by my very own Angel of Music, but in the end, it was not enough, and I was not enough. I am alone with my hollowness once more, and do not know how to escape it, to make the illimitable emptiness end.

The memories are inescapable. Echoes of soft blue eyes and the resigned sadness they held...the pulse of a heartbeat pressed against me. The brief flicker of warmth and completeness that I felt during that singular embrace haunts me completely, and it is though it runs within my own blood, circulating through me and scraping me to death from the inside with need for human contact and connection. It is burned into me, and it sharpens the throbbing hopelessness I feel.

I cannot live like this.

It is as if when the person you love leaves, they take all of the air with them when they go, and you are left to suffocate and choke on the despair you feel. I am trying in vain to breathe through the small bubbles of time in which I momentarily forget what has happened, when I fall asleep for a few blessedly dreamless minutes, but something always brings me back to the image of those perfect lips telling me that it is over now, and my lungs cease to function yet again.

What do you do when your heart is broken?

How can you rouse yourself from the depths of your own silent misery to continue living when something as mundane as dressing yourself requires such Herculean effort. To pick up the pieces, to stitch yourself back together, to continue to be...it all seems to lack a purpose. I find no enjoyment in living now. It is all tainted with sadness and the ghost of someone I once had. Music, that one true opiate which always, always brought me peace is now serrated with the promise that I will never be able to lose myself in it without hearing that voice ring its resonant beauty in my head.

I can find no happiness in my own existence anymore. There is nothing that I want to live for, and no one who wants me to, and I can feel myself succumbing to the need of my soul to wither away and cease to be. I feel so brittle, as though my emotions are rotting me from the inside and making me as physically fragile as I sense myself to be.

I feel such a wretched desire to allow myself to be ended by the pain, to die, to rip out my heart and let the scalding love within it burn something, anything else, to let the acrid, boiling blood drip away, allowing the need to be wanted to slip from my body so that I may at last taste the cold. I want to feel nothing, not even the hollowness, as though I were more ice than man. I want it to be over. Anything to make it stop.

The initials E and C have been ruthlessly carved into my life, bleeding where the letters have been traced too deep by time and heartache. I shall never escape this sadness. It is too much a part of me, and in the end, it is going to kill me. I know it to be true.

The imprint of you on my life is killing me. You were everything to me, and I built my life around loving you. Now, I am lost, and I need you to save me. Please. You know me better than anyone has ever tried to, and you know that there is nothing more important to me than you. You were the sun in my life, the glorious warmth and light which beckoned me to meet you on the inky edge of night to share in a glorious sunset, full of color and compassion and freedom from the chains of my isolation. Now, the chains are bound too tight, and they are constricting my life away. I need you to take my hand again, and lead me from the monochromatic darkness that slowly murders me, heart and soul. Save me, please. I beg of you. Without you, life continues on, yet I am gone, carried away like dust on the wind. Without you, I am nothing.

So what is left for me?

What do you do when your heart has expired?

"Take these broken wings and learn to fly."