breathing in the fallout from a cremated relationship torn between the claustrophobic compulsion to run and the conviction that without her my life could have no meaning, i reviewed the recent past with that self-indulgent eye open only to spurned lovers, and allowed myself to feel wretched. my leaden mind, fatigued by night after night of homage to a long-irrelevant icon, wandered accidently from the carefully demarcated path it was so accustomed to treading, and instead applied a dusty underused sense of perspective to my memories. i looked dispassionately on those firey love-hued weeks before the break-up, and saw only a military happiness fuelled by too much wine and naivety. i gazed up through my libertine eyes and realised that what i had mistaken for a look of deep spiritual love set against the twilit ceiling was in fact lust transmuted into what i desperately wanted to see. in my miserable mourning for the death of love i saw only a pathetic unwillingness to give up hope, in the drunken rages at the injustice in her soul only a petulant venting of the violence in mine. the middle line between the love and the hate traced only a hideous lack of feeling. and in her treatment of me i saw only a dishonest sexual catharsis, and i finally saw a heart which had never really loved me. This, however was only a temporary lapse in self-pity, and i soon pulled myself together.
