Annabel

I loved her the way Poe loved— not with sense but with fever, not with reason but with the part of the brain that dreams awake and calls it clarity. She lived in a kingdom by the sea— or maybe it was an apartment on the third floor with a window that faced the water if you leaned far enough and believed hard enough. The angels were not envious. The angels had nothing to do with it. We destroyed ourselves the way all beautiful things self-destruct— not from the outside but from the weight of too much beauty inside. I buried her not in a sepulchre but in the place all lost loves go: the 3 AM thought, the song that shouldn't hurt but does, the way I still check for her name in every room I enter. Poe understood: love and death are not opposites. They are neighbors. They share a wall. And late at night, if you press your ear against it, you can hear one becoming the other. I am not mad. I am not haunted. I am just a man who loved with Poe's particular illness— the kind that doesn't kill you but never quite lets you recover.