"Time heals all wounds but the razor's mark across my wrist and it's my blood that flow so freely from this pen."

- Paul Bearer

I would be lying if I said that I wasn't constantly looking over my shoulder with a deeply rooted emotional fear. I had come to see the bands and enjoy the company of good friends, but that was all shadowed by the looming danger of a chance confrontation with my ex-girlfriend and her beau.

My roommate spotted them moving through the crowd of the Siren Music Festival sometime after I arrived.

I'm sure the Cyclone roller coaster was professionally envious of my tightly wrenched stomach. His drops and turns could never compare to the nauseating torture I visit upon myself with the threat of a confrontation with her.

Somehow, I lasted a good four and a half hours before giving in and going home. No sightings, no unpleasant "how are you", no bloody ulcerated-vomit.

Resting easy is not my style.

At seven this morning, I was shaken out of a vivid and confrontational dream about her, my heart beating like a racehorse in the lead. Suddenly, for one moment, all the shit flooded back upon me and I found myself living in moments that passed more then a year ago.

The pretense of optimism fades, and for one clear moment I know that it doesn't get better. For those few seconds, I know in my heart that "moving on" is a joke we play on ourselves.

Inside those thoughts, I felt so very sorry for the new girl, because I know that she is just a bandage over an old festering wound. The more I try to plug that hole with people, the more it stays empty.

Thoughts bring me to Gretchen and how real she felt for that short period of time. How the world faded between her lips. How our histories and our hurts were transported to a place well beyond consideration. How our vastly empty souls became less burdened when we were together.

But she was just the bridled hope that lead me in circles inside the stable. She danced for a time, and then bolted away leaving me with broken reins and shit-covered shoes.

I am everyone's rebound.

In the end, every relationship is just a short escape from memories of that other girl, that other love. I always find myself looking over my shoulder again. Waiting, dreading, hoping.

But despite all the threats of reality, that girl...that love remains an apparition of my memories, endlessly haunting me beyond the grave of our miserable relationship.

A long time ago, in the infancy of our love, we escaped to an island in Mexico for a romantic getaway. Her encouraging exuberance and my bloated bank account bought us a week on the beach beneath the endless sun.

For a short time, all my insecurities melted away under the warmth of my first truly loving interaction with another human being. All the tortured childhood moments, all the death and disappointment, all the open wounds of my soul scabbed over in the rays of her beautiful love.

For the first time in my life, I felt satisfied and complete. I understood that there could be more to life then endless misery and empty futures. For the first time in my existence, I felt wanted, I felt needed. I breathed air to continue rather then to prolong.

Miles away from any care and any worry, I saw my reflection in the love of her eyes.

There, between the sheets in Cozumel, we kissed each other and held our bodies inside overpowering warmth. I released my heart into the undying fury of true love, shattering the ice that had grown over it in the past ten years. I awakened that part of me that I buried in the ground on Valentine's Day. I gave her my open arms, my open heart, and my eternal love.

And there, between the sheets in Cozumel, we made love for the first time.

I felt the heart-racing abandonment and passion of absolute love as it overtook the bounds of the physical world, welcoming us into a new existence. For a short time, two wandering souls became singular.

As we finished that moment, all the passion and love and excitement of our first union grew into a comforting warmth inside me. I wanted to bathe her with love. I wanted to kiss her and fall into her lips, never again to exist as a solitary creature. I wanted to wrap her in all the warmth of my life.

But as we finished that moment, she rolled away from me and began to cry...

I sat there stunned, my heart as naked as my body, and I watched as she shuddered into hysterics. I felt my insides dying with her every tear as she told me she was crying because she was thinking about her ex-boyfriend.

In the moment that was supposed to represent the union of our hearts, I was left sitting alone on the edge of the bed while she mourned her true love.

Somehow, with all the weight of my heart, that event was even more painful then the moments I spent watching my father die.

Eventually she composed herself and we continued our lives as if nothing had happened. We spent the next year in a downward spiral of break-ups and reunions. Mood swings and emotional battery. A hit-and-run relationship at its worst.

Every day that we were together, I thought back to those tears in Mexico. And every day she punished me for not being him.

It is two years later now. They are living together, a new life with her old love.

I'm sure she exists without memories of me, with ignorance of my endless mental self-mutilation. I am nothing but a ghost in a snapshot, a distant fling. I expect, much like all her previous loves, I am little more then the butt of an occasional joke.

I know that somehow this makes the world right again. It's just not right for me.

However near or far away my death lies, I know I shall spend the preceding moments replaying that day in Cozumel. Every teardrop on that pillow, every sorrowed word looping over and over like an old newsreel.

When that object or illness finally ends the life of my body, many people will mourn my passing, but few will understand that I died a long time ago.