This is what it's like.
...it seems more important to say goodbye to this place. Acknowledge what happened here, honor it in some way. This is the only way I know. To try to say what it was, how it was, even if it's over. And it is. Roger that. Over and out.
Life and death and frailty, and trying so hard to build, to sculpt diamonds from coal and all the time the heart is coal, but you don't know that, you don't know that it could take hundreds of years and all the soot in the swamp to make it shine, and you don't know that no matter what you do, what movements what motions what sacrifices, it can never shine enough, can only dully reflect.
You can't know that, so you polish and polish and show them, "look how it shines--can you see yourself?" and they shine back at you, tell you "almost enough," to keep polishing, and you can't know that it will never ever be bright enough for them to see all the way through. They don't know, so how could you?
What can be mistaken for love usually is.
And then losing it and shattering, you're lying in a pool of your own muddy blood, what is left of it anyway, and finding yourself there, it's drowning or not.
Respect, RB.
