I believe I have lost something—just recently—something that is so dear, dear to me. It has, after all this time, been my companion in lonely nights—my cold prison, my favorite torture, the vessel of my deepest regrets and bitter anguish. It is a consuming fire that has scorched this pitiable heart beyond recognition yet kept it warm and beating. It is what reminded me that I am alive, which I quite often forget, and capable of emotions, after all. True, I may have been trying to rid myself of it, for years and years, and finding that I am unable to do so—kept it, like a hideous talisman, close to my bosom. But now, oh so suddenly, it is gone! Her face, her voice, her graceful intelligence—qualities that I once adored and obsessively worshiped, have simply lost their charms and now seem so—ordinary. Her presence no longer drove my heart into a deranged drumming, which she always once did, nor does her melodious voice eerily haunt me at night, nor does her soft touch skewer my entire being with something not unlike electrocution. No more do I dream of her, asleep or awake, nor think of her, if at all, with any genuine affection that I was once in excess of. The regrets have all flown away, the memories have faded, and the fires within my heart have suffered severe hypothermia and silently died that not a single ember remain aglow. It is all gone. Now I can say, with near certainty, that my love for her has died. And with that—I am free. I should gleefully laugh and prance about with all the delirious cheerfulness of a captive slave who has found his chains and manacles suddenly undone in a mad celebration for this long-sought and much-awaited freedom. Yet, somehow I feel so hollow, numbed, indifferent—like a drunken bastard would feel over a spilled bowl of peanuts that, in a moment of mirth, he had kicked across the floor. I feel nothing. It is a disappointing and unsatisfactory conclusion to a very long turbulent affair of love, hate, and forgiveness—that ended without so much as a fart of pyrotechnics.