I peel back the dead skin that still linger on the moth-eaten curtains and I pile them into the fireplace, along with the rusted vintage goblets that you used to drown your sorrows in and the wine-stained volumes of temperate insanity that you used to delve your wasted self into.
And then I have to wonder in detached curiosity, as I strike the match and throw it into the hearth and the amber flames race across the discarded scraps of your memory, exactly why you were always so far away, why you never seemed to fit into my grasp…
The fire licks across the skeletons of the book spines, and it occurs to me that I have never ever felt your heartbeat once, and when the last of your meager existence is plunged into the heat, I realize, you were dead to begin with, there was nothing to save after all.