You would think we are given arms only so we may hold the ones we love as they die. Certainly you have never been given any reason to think otherwise, and I wonder if this is why the only part of the dream I can recall is the end. Do you leave me with the memory of holding his broken body in my arms as punishment, or simply because that is the moment you, too, are forced to replay? When you look back on your time together, can you even trust your memories? Or does your grief rewrite every loving embrace into the desperate clinging of the living to the dead and dying? I do not think your arms were made for cradling corpses, but somewhere along the line that became your specialty. Do you wonder, deep down beneath the cigarettes and alcohol and morphine, if the dying part does not precede your touch, but the other way around?