When you're dreaming with a broken heart/Sometimes they wither

The withered flowers still light up my pale, sick table. What good can possibly come from this pain and agony? Although he is gone, he is all around me, in every square centimetre of my apartment, as if he never left. The flowers look up at me, defeated like my own heart, asking for death and where the next batch is, to replace them. The next batch does not come. These dying roses are the last remnant of a ritual I fell in love with far too soon, far too quick, transfixed in that bliss of pathetic hope and naïve admiration. I look to the trash and try to master the strength of picking them up and throwing them out, along with his Madhatter 10/6 note, reminding me of that amazing St Pattys night when he told me of our future he had planned. I try to clean him out. I wash the table on which his beer spilt; I rip the sheets of my bed, surrounding myself in his smell unified with mine; I vacuum clean and suck his soul out of my own. But the flowers persist. Although they are dead now, their heartbeat is his, pumping through my apartment like fierce fireworks of poisoned sparks. I smell the roses, but just as us, their essence has departed this world, and entered another realm of reality, like his darkened one. I get out of bed and feel all my muscles screaming out in pain with the sickness. But I force myself. I pick up the shirt I wore that night we said goodbye and put it in with the rest of the laundry; my underwear from the bathroom where we shared our last shower. It is all thrown into a big, blue IKEA bag and placed by my door, waiting for the rain to stop outside so his essence can disappear into the washing machine drain and in the calm, soothing, comforting autumn wind. Ironic. I miss you most of all, my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall. Three weeks in ignorant bliss. The future ahead, without you around. I sit down in the large cathedral and pray you’ll be all right. Not to God. To the architects who brought us together, who placed me into this misery and pain, who are now my enemies, who posed me with an impossible puzzle I was forced to turn down. And still I beg them for your release. If I could only make that deal with them; I would give anything to have you back in my life, and must still persist in my conviction that you are gone, for now. “And remember that I will always love you. Bye my love – for now,” you wrote. The flowers shriek. “After Africa,” I tell them, “I’ll deal with you then”.