And Then, Before the Sleeping Pills

And then, before the sleeping pills could do their weary work, D crawled up and wrote this letter. In it, he said all he could not say when he thought he was going to die, because the pain was so extreme, and he thought he was dying of a heart attack, or a stroke; His heart had crashed open, and he couldn’t breathe; He couldn't even sit still and had to get up to walk. He walked around his empty flat and was terrified at the sounds he seemed to be making, and which he never heard before, echoing back at him.
What did he sound like now?
What did he look like now?
Where did he have to go now?
Where were all these tears coming from, the hot cascade?
D cried like this for hours, and hours.
In the letter, which he tried to keep dry, he wrote all that was unsaid, all the fear, all the sadness, all the horror, all the truth, the big truths and the little truths, all the anger and all the hurt, but nothing made sense because, for once, elegant language failed him.
The sentences were incomplete, and words scrawls and scratches.
And then he took another pill, and then another.