Purgatory.

I didn't die every day without you. No, there is too much sweet finality that comes with death. There is too much blessed completion. Every day without you was dying without the satisfaction of death. It was the last breaths without the last breath.

A thousand silences.

What I want to say is that I'm stuck on a thousand words. They sit like opulent pearls on the tip of my tongue and refuse to come out. They slide and slither down my throat, cool and horrid all at once, but refuse to come out.

I'm afraid of my incompetence. I'm afraid of a thousand things said prettily in a thousand words. I'm afraid of a thousand beasts, snarling poetically at the tip of my tongue. I'm afraid of hurt and anger and cruelty, which bobs neatly along my collarbones and threatens to climb higher. I'm afraid of fake and sweet and cotton candy, which tickles my nose and sticks to my teeth.

I'm afraid of the silence which sits in my limbs and climbs in my soul. That, I am afraid of the most. It is not sweet, it is not malevolent. It is.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

The Crack-Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald