After I Killed You, I Stopped Listening to My Master.

“You must kill the thing you love,” my Master says. “You cannot love something that does not exist.” The water began to build up in my bottom eyelids. The crack on the surface of the ice was spreading in the center of a wasteland of bones. When the crack traveled to the shore, the cold water snuck inside the skulls and escaped out of the eye sockets. It was then that I remembered us in winter. And the small salty pools grew in my eyes, and overflowed like rain gushing out of pipes into streets. I was only pieces of emotions, scraps of memories, threads of the blanket that once kept both of us warm. And I could not reconcile these particles with the gaps and vague images of unrecognizable ghost faces. It was too difficult to understand what had really happened; who pulled apart the material, how the photos got stained, and why the room that once echoed our laughter was silent. But there was still love. I collapsed in the middle of the lake and the force from my heavy body broke the ice. “You must stop loving the thing that you killed,” my Master says. “Dead things are not worth your love.” The water was cold remorse conquering my lungs, robbing me of life. But I found comfort in knowing that the lake had loved me, for as it was dying it had killed me like I had murdered the trees and flowers, animals and insects that once were its soul. In killing the thing that I had loved, I had discovered that it loved me also. Now I am cold bones on the bottom, kept full with a lake of tears, once alive and whole in the memories of us in summer, before the lake began to freeze.