How can you ever smile, as if your life hadn't capsized?

Have I really fallen so far? Am I so broken? Unable to be fixed? Like a chair that squeaks am I kept only for my practical purpose but is an embarrassment to any and all who is to look or listen? Our relationship is but stained glass that has become ugly to you. The suffocation of these times is overwhelming me. Grief is making me a machine. By inflicting this piteous spectacle on myself, I feel, I'm not trying to exhaust the scandal of it, the insurmountable feeling of a transgression, of a monstrous violation of the Good and the Beautiful, but rather this feeling of scandal came to wear out all by itself, one got used to it, and in the long run stopped feeling much; thus what I was trying, desperately but in vain, to regain was actually that initial shock, that sensation of a rupture, an infinite disturbance of my whole being; instead of that, I now feel only a dull, anxious kind of excitation, always briefer, more acrid, mixed with the fever and my physical symptoms, and thus, slowly, without truly realizing it, I am sinking into the mud while searching for the light...

One of many incidents threw a harsh light on these fissures. In one breath she cannot stand the site of me, to be near me! And in another she can look at my face yet shy away when I mentioned the name of god, not that I believe in such nonsense. Religion is morality for those who cannot think of it for themselves. But I digress. Is it such a burden to be proud of me? Is it so embarrassing? If so, then why the charade? Before when I asked this, nothing, but a blank stare of uncaring. She looked at me, a clear, luminous look, washed of everything, and I saw that she understood everything, knew everything in her own primitive way, and faced with this pure knowledge I burst into flames. My clothes crackled, the skin of my belly melted, the fat sizzled, fire roared in my eye sockets and my mouth, and cleaned out the inside of my skull. The blaze was so intense she had to turn her head away. I burned to a cinder, my remains were transformed into a salt statue; soon it cooled down, pieces broke off, first a shoulder, then a hand, then half a head. Finally I finished collapsing at her feet and the wind swept away the pile of salt and scattered it. Perhaps this is why others cannot stare at me for long, my burning visage a plague upon them. Wishful thinking I suppose, wishful thinking of a dying man, inside and out.

For days on end I reflected on this strange scene; but my reflection stood before me like a mirror, and never returned anything to me but my own image, reversed of course, but true. Hideous, grotesque, an embarrassment. And still we play this game that I know is coming to an end, a painful, heartbreaking end. For I have just started the realization, and am only recently living it, where she must have been living it for months. I wish only to stay whole, a feet that is already proving to be impossible. This whole time I've been dying to live only to find that in the end I am living to die...