Lamentation 2: the pointless dawn that will never have know you

In his book The Man of Feeling, Javier Marías evokes the heart-breaking loss of watching a lover die, and the acutely inescapable reality it brings with it of one's own mortality.

When you die, I will truly mourn you. I will approach your transfigured face to plant desperate kisses on your lips in one last effort, full of arrogance and faith, to return you to the world that has rendered you redundant. I will feel that my own life bears a wound and will consider my own history to have split in two by that final, definitive moment of yours. I will tenderly close your surprised, reluctant eyes and I will watch over your white, mutant body all through the night and into the pointless dawn that will never have known you. I will remove your pillow and the damp sheets. Incapable of conceiving of life without your daily presence and seeing you lying there, lifeless, I will want to rush headlong after you. I will visit your tomb and, alone in the cemetery, having climbed up the steep hill and having looked at you, lovingly, wearily, through the inscribed stone, I will talk to you. I will see my own death foretold in yours, I will look at my own photo and, recognizing myself in your stiff features, I will cease to believe in the reality of your extinction because it gives body and credibility to my own. For no one is capable of imagining their own death. (169)

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Other reviews / information:

My review of The Man of Feeling here.

Another entry in an occasional series of posts of lamentation. (The introduction to this series can be found here, and links to the complete series here.)