Young enough. Reflect on years. That's... that's what this is about. Yes, let's year-in-review. Visit tragedies and miseries and the sex. The violence. The death. Get a VH1 crew in here to do the cameos, pan in, zoom out, catch every nuance off the glance of lens on film.

So I'm young enough to still count time in years. Days in minutes. I don't... I don't apologize for that. I have been wandering the last year, lost and driftless. I tried my own place just outside the city, left not too long after. Found David, fought. It feels like everything I've done has been done in these... fragmented chunks. Like I could slice them out with a scalpel and turn them over in my hands and examine them. Root my fingers around in the detritus of my life and really get dirty, right down to my elbows.

God... is that what I want? To make a mess of this? To be the fucking lunatic he thinks I am?

No, no. He looks at me like... like he loves me. Like he loves me and I betrayed him. I promised him the sweetness, the saccharine; I said it'd never die. I did that. And I let something fester inside me, crawl up and burrow deep, worm its mealy resentment right into my heart.

I am wrong. I was wrong. So I left. Tore myself out of there, bat-out-of-hell. I laugh at the analogy. Whatever. I got myself gone... not like he needs the crazy place my head's in - was.

But I spent a little time... elsewhere. Watching. I can't say I was doing more good than harm, to do so would negate all the blood on these hands even now... but, but I tried. I think of the look on his face. Jesus. The look. The way the gentle lines, so soft, drew severe. The way his eyes darkened. And I want to fall on my knees. Pray, "Father, forgive me." Draw my hand just... oh God... just there. "Don't you see? Don't you see I can't share your proximity without want and need and... to climb inside, like a cancer. To consume every part of you for myself. To draw out the old, to make you... anything, everything. You gave me this and I can't be within arms length without choking on the magnitude of what we are. Things I could never be with..."

And that's the point. The point. The sharp and finite DAGGER FUCKING POINT.

So I stay just off the radar. There are times I feel them. Never David. I wonder if he sends the others, just so he knows I'm safe. I'm well. But I feel them, can sense them. Whatever power I have, it's strong. Fuck all the rest of them with their whispered jealousies. What I have is mine and his and... well, mine and his... and beats like forever in my veins. Maybe we don't have that long, but this love... this love will stay as long as I do.

I wonder. Will I ever become what I once was? Will I return to the sweetheart girl with the heart-shaped mouth, the limpid eyes? To the innocence that once was? Or will I always be some amalgam of these complex worlds - the then, the now, the impending eternity ahead? Could he ever love me that way? Could he ever forgive me for unknowingly lying to him before my life became the paper bird folded tenderly into the palm of his hand?

It's doesn't matter the ground I cover or the days gone by, David Talbot. I was made for you and in your blood I shall live.