Eight years ago, in the summer of 2012, my muse, my lover, died of cancer and I died with him. I learned for the first time what the words “heavy heart” really mean, and only someone who has been there knows exactly what I mean.

I wandered the earth a ghost after that. Everything I ever was before was gone. I remember being so, fucking, thirsty. It’s the only way I can describe it. An endless yearning, an emptiness demanding to be filled. I kept waking up near the ocean, instinctively called there, and still thirsty.

I wrote about it here and there. For eight years, I’ve been trying to process what this is.

This is the closest I’ve ever come to what it was like in the underworld. Black webs of the summer garden gone all winter, surrendering to the drowning because there was nothing else to do.

Still, and ever, thirsty.