You can feel something snap deep inside you, and you let go. You can feel the blood run, fresh and red and oh, so perfectly painful. You can feel nonexistent fingers boring into your flesh, the nails ripping your skin open, you can feel more blood pour out, you can see it, but the fingers are not there. They never will be. You can feel them and if you close your eyes, you can even pretend that they're there, making you feel as they used to. You rip your skin open and you pretend that you're not the one doing it, you close your eyes, fearing the fall that will inevitably happen once you open them again. You even fall asleep like that, alone with the lingering touch of a ghost on your skin, a touch that was never as violent as you made it over the years, despairing over the loss of the fingers, the lean fingers that used to touch you where now only your own do. You allow yourself to still be bloody, dirty in the morning, waking up with a sense of emptiness, just like any other day. You clean the blood only where it would be seen. The blood is the only thing, the only thing that you consider a living memory of the ghost, even though the only times your blood would flow so profusely as it does were the ones that you caused. Every night, you hold onto the one thing that you can still make yourself feel. Nothing else is as vivid anymore, the memories you swore you'd save have faded, any kind of pleasure you could feel has been gone for years, and even the pain is slowly growing fainter. You don't know what you'll do once it leaves you. It is the only thing that can bring the ghost of a being you cherish back , even if for a mere second, make the memories come to life, even imagine what could have been had it not all ended so abruptly. You hadn't even realised how much you'd become dependent on a single person until they disappeared, leaving you with a wound that refused to heal over time and instead festered and became even more painful. You will die of it, you are certain. But not before it makes you suffer until you go numb. The way you'll die will be humiliating, you know that. One that does such things can't leave with their dignity intact. Especially when they begin to hear rumours that say that they ripped from the world the one person they would've given anything to keep. You would have done anything, given up everything, anything at all, for a single person's life. But that was the one thing that was meant to end.
You died a slow death, descending slowly into insanity and illness while the rumours never went away and you memories did, ever so slowly, but still they left you there, accused of the one crime you could have never thought of committing. They stopped you from reliving your memories in the only way you knew of, so you found another way, one of a desperate man, one that made you slip slowly as you cared less and less about what was left of your name and dignity. You faded as your memories regained power, until they took over completely and you lost yourself in the darkness of the night, never to come back.
I don't know what happened to you after you left to chase after your beautiful ghost, but I hope that you are reunited. I knew it all along, but you never seemed ready to let me help you. I am truly sorry for making the mistake of letting you destroy yourself.
Author's note: This is one of my numerous headcanons about Salieri after Mozart's death. It might be from his wife's POV, but it doesn't matter, really. Please review. I might post more if people like this. I might post more even if this gets ignored, actually, but it's less probable.