xx The M e n a g e r i e of the L i v i n g Dead xx

Chapter 7. Nothing is Forever.

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first-person point-of-view (Iris)

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I hate this. I may be holding you now, and you’re so warm and solid in my arms, but that warmth and solidity is like an empty promise. Even if we’re together for a year, or ten, or a thousand, someday we’ll go our separate ways. I might try to hold on, I might try to keep you within my reach, within my arms like this, but you’ll inevitably drift away. (It can’t be helped, or so you’ve told me.) And then three thousand years later, you’ll be like a distant memory, one of those dreams that only barely clings to my conscious mind after awaking. I hate that the relationships I make are like water, always slipping through my fingers and trickling back into the stream of time. And like a man dying of thirst, they’re the relationships that I want, crave, need the most. In the grand scheme of things,

you might as well just not be here. And then everything wouldn’t hurt as much.

…Right?