The past recedes even when the future does not approach.

I realized, the other day, that I had for some time forgotten to feed your ghost the diet of nostalgia, half-imagined memories and too-fond reminiscences on which it subsisted. Back when it was new, when I snapped it off of you like a cutting from a vine, I carried it with me everywhere. It was a terrible companion. It claimed to love me, and probably it did. When I tried, hesitantly, to find someone new, it mocked me in just the way I mock myself. When I tried to walk down the street and empty my mind, to fill myself with the sound of wind through the trees, it would blow the scent of your perfume across my face. When I spoke with you it wound itself around me and squeezed, and in a quiet scream insisted "She'll come back she'll come back you're not alone she'll change her mind." I think it really did believe that. I loathed its idiot droning, its irreparable sentimentality, and I hated myself because I could neither correct it nor banish it... and I must admit that I did not want to. It was the worst friend, the very worst, but it was there. It was my pretend-loneliness, my little game, and without it I would have to look at the cruel, cloudless sky and let the life stream from my eyes out into the void.

I think you saw it once, and if it scared you, what can I say? It scared me too, sometimes. Often.

It's dead now, anyways. I went looking for it and I couldn't find it, just a few wisps of ectoplasm smeared across a canvas. It's gone to the second afterlife, the land of the dead for whom no one pays remembrance. But one thing more is left: its own ghost, a shadow of a shadow, a feeling like emptiness... or more like void. Not an empty room, but no room at all. Once I kept a cup which I would fill with your essence. When it began to grow dry, I poured myself into it, because I could not bear to see it empty. But now even the cup is gone. All that remains is an epitaph.

And now that is done too.