I like walking along the beach, barefoot, by myself. Watching the inexhaustible waves. Feeling them wash away these pieces of my broken heart. Sometimes, I think I can fool the world into believing I don't care. And I do. I fool them all. But then, you see, the thing is, I can't fool myself. And I do care. And that's what makes everything so fucking hard. I care, I care, I care, I care.

Imperturbability? HAH!

So I make hundreds of resolutions. I have filled maybe 20 goodly-sized journals with them. I resolve to endeavour to try to pull myself up by the bootstraps. Start afresh. Go somewhere. Achieve something.

But it's all flat, flat, flat. Tepid. A Coke left out in the rain. No more fizz. No more bubbles. No more life. No more champagne. What happened to effervescence? What about that little spark of joy that starts in the solar plexus and travels up to my throat?

Let's see. Let's do a he said, she said, shall we? Just for fun.

He said: I love you. Will you marry me?

Then he said: Oh, yeah, but it comes with provisos. I think we could both work on you, make a few improvements.

She said: I thought you said you loved me.

And he said: I do, I do, but what's love anyway. We live to evolve...we should make improvements. What you need is a loving hand to guide you.

Here's where she should have told him to go fuck himself.

Instead, she said: What did you have in mind?

And he said: I've lined up a personal trainer. He will be here on Saturday.

And he said: No, I think you've had enough. No dessert. Don't forget what we're trying to achieve.

And he said: Have you gone running today?

And she said: My soul is no longer my own.

And he said: Don't exaggerate.

And she said: Look, no offence, but I need my own space. I want to move out.

And he said: You want to move out? Really?

And she said: You betcha.

And he said: In that case, it would be better for us to break up.

And so they did. And they wrote each other out of their respective stories. And years later, she saw him across the street, walking with his wife, both chubby, middle-aged and happy...and she wrote the following:

I'm not there,
You know I'm not
You have cancelled me out
a hole in the air,
an absence
that was never
present.

That picture you took,
has started to fade,
It knows what you've done.
It knows.

Replaced me with flesh and bone
a bellyful of tubes,
pumping real blood.

She's vivid,
with reds and blues and purples.
Rubens, perhaps?
while I am sepia-tinted
unfocussed, blurred.

You can cancel history,
Rewrite the past
so I cease to exist,
if you say it often enough,
they will believe you,
they will believe.

I feel the wind,
blow through me now,
I feel the gazes slide off,
I'm a hole in the air,
I'm just not there.
Not there.