I never understood her.

I could never grasp her innermost thoughts or feelings, and thus could never fully sympathize with her.  I was never the person she thought I was, and I, endeavoring to please her, lived the endless lie. I did not cry for her – I cried for myself, cried for what I could not cry for. I made feeble excuses to keep her by my side, to remain by hers. In a sense, I loved her, but never the way she loved me.

I…could not fully devote my heart to her.

A sliver of my own spirit remained within me, and only just, for the remainder of my tattered soul had been hastily patched together with fumbling pieces of her own. My ‘love’ for her had been a passing fondness; nothing everlasting. My detachment from others had long settled itself into my character; I could not love. Only the desperate eagerness I felt from the life she had given me kept me clinging to her sleeve in aching guilt.

I wanted to love her. I wanted her to enjoy herself, to feel emotion before it left her altogether. Yet, as sincere as those gentle smiles seemed, her eyes were ever cold and lonely, singed with a glimmer of desperate insanity. I soon discovered her fervor was little different from my own: we lived only for each other.

Her feelings, however, were genuine. I had only attached myself to her in remorse. I had no true purpose in life; my death would have been of little consequence.

…and yet, she brought me back. So knowledgeable yet so naïve…I wanted to weep for not being able to die, yet to weep because I was still alive and breathing. I had never seen such worry or sadness in her eyes before. She had cheated the Grey One for me – I had nothing to give her for that. Nothing…but myself…and that was what I gave.

I learned her likes and dislikes, found which excuses she found acceptable and which would require further inquiry, what she thought of and what she dreamt. I became a part of her, it seemed, so near and far at the same time, so close to understanding, yet so terribly wrong about it all. And in her arms, I would cry because of it.

It could be love; a love of a pitying, guilty sort, like a child and his least favorite toy, who keeps it only because it is his.

...or is it, instead, something my heart refuses to acknowledge?