Myspace Blogs shut down, and I thought I had lost my old shorts forever, but they e-mailed them to me. And for that, I am grateful.

   They told me that you may have been able to hear me, even if you couldn't respond. I didn't believe them. If you could hear me, you would be incapable of keeping that straight face, incapable of keeping those blue-sky eyes comfortably shut. If you could hear me crying like that, you would sit up. You would take me in your arms and you'd tell me in that low, steady voice that everything was going to be alright, even though we both knew nothing was alright, nothing ever would be alright again. Because without you beside me, nothing could be real.

    I sat beside that electronic contraption of a bed and traced your veins with my fingertips, pretending they were a blueprint for our life and that if I could just memorize every twist and curve, then I could rebuild what we'd had. What we should have now. What was taken away by the Chiclet-square teeth and quick tongue of some million-dollar doctor who couldn't wrench his eyes from his shiny black shoes to tell me that the only man I'd ever love was going to die, and that there was nothing anybody could do, and that I should probably just go home and get some sleep because you weren't going to wake up anyhow, and that he was sorry, sir, but he had other patients to see.

    I was kept from your body by a web of wires and tubes and beeps and tears and memories. And all I could think was what Sarah said. That love is watching someone die. And I thought, then this should be easier, shouldn't it? This should be the most natural thing in the world. But instead, I held my breath, because I felt that I'd already taken too many today and you hadn't taken enough, and I watched as each descending peak on the LCD took you a little farther away from me. And I thought of everything that we were supposed to do. We were supposed to buy that little car, you know, the one with some ridiculous 30 miles to the gallon? And we were supposed to get married in a backyard somewhere, and we were supposed to honeymoon on that little stretch of rocks and sand on the edge of Lake Huron, in that cottage we'd fallen in love with one summer. And we were supposed to have a puppy and a house and maybe a kid or two, eventually. Eventually. But every plan we'd ever made was just a tiny prayer to father time, wasn't it? And now eventually would never come.

    I traced your shape with my eyes, storing you in my memory, trying to form a lasting image. And it stung like a violent wind to realize that our memories depend on a faulty camera in our minds, and that no matter how hard I tried to hold on, you would fade. And as the TV entertained itself in the corner, the beeps and whirs and the rushing of air through that tube in your nose came to a halt, and I prepared to speak a final word in that place where we only say goodbye. But it didn't happen like in the movies. You didn't slowly exhale, admit defeat, fade quickly and give way to the orderlies waiting anxiously with a stretcher, wondering how I was going to take it, if I was going to be one of those crazy guys that screamed and threw things and tore the curtains down as his lover died. You kept on breathing, even without the assistance. But you looked increasingly haggard and your breaths came in uneven jolts, like someone was shoving the air down your throat against your will. Maybe God. Maybe me. After an hour, it slowed. Your muscles relaxed, and you were gone. And Sarah's words still rang through my head, almost annoyingly, like a fight song at a college football game; yeah, yeah, it's that song again, lah-dee-dah, go fight roar, it was fun the first time, but enough already. Love is watching someone die. Right. But who was going to watch me die?

    As I drifted through the waiting room, everyone lifted their heads from the linoleum, briefly, almost unnoticeably. Nobody really looked at me. I wondered if it was because I was gay and they didn't know how to relate to me, or if they just didn't want to see the truth in my eyes, the blatant evidence of extreme loss that they were soon to experience for themselves. In either case, I pitied them. I moved stoically forward.

    I made my way downstairs and into the gargantuan parking structure, realizing that I had no idea where I had parked. I wandered the rows and rows of vehicles, remembering... remembering. You would have laughed at how silly this was, me, lost in this sea of impersonal SUVs and Hummers and pickups, emotionless. Like Pacman. Just doing my job, navigating these corridors.

     I retained the stone façade I had held since you'd gone until finally I found the car. I slid into the front seat and just sat, staring ahead at the glare of my headlights on the dimmed bulbs of the car parked in the spot in front of me, facing mine. My lights were giving life to those dead lamps, it seemed. I almost laughed at the futility of the thought that immediately ran through my head: that I wished I could somehow restore your life, just like that. One headlight to another. A simple turn of the key.

    I needed a smoke. I never smoked. You always did. Somehow it felt appropriate. I rifled through the CD pamphlets and discarded takeout menus in the center console with no luck. I moved on to the glove compartment, hoping to find your stash. Id always thought that the glove compartment was inaccurately named, because behind its door was nothing to keep my fingers warm. Except this time, I was wrong. There lay the intricately knit gloves I'd thought I'd lost two winters ago, the ones you'd bought me for Christmas the year I'd bought you that Espresso machine. You said you felt like a shitty boyfriend, but I said it was okay, because I would drink your espresso and I wouldn't let you wear my gloves. I pulled the gloves from their no-bigger-than-a-breadbox prison and ran my fingers across them. I brought them to my face and inhaled. The grey knit smelled like cigarettes, because you had insisted on warming my trembling fingers with your tainted breath. And I hated you for insisting and I hated you for making me feel like I needed you and I hated you for leaving always the faint scent of tobacco embedded in the wool and I loved you for being the only person I had to find such trivial reasons to hate.

    It wasn't cold out. It was hardly autumn. But I slipped the gloves over my shaking fingers anyway, adding a smell to my sensory portrait of you. And I could swear, as I pulled them on, I heard your voice in my ear. "Are you crying?" you asked. "No," I replied, voice stale and thin in the empty car. A single tear carved its way through my stony exterior. And it came to me then that you were a truth I would rather have lost than to have never lain beside at all. You asked: "Why not?"