"Been' long." He chuckled.

His response was nothing but silence, as the darkness moved yet again before his eyes.

"Have you come to feed on my carcass?"

His insult was also met with silence.

"You were always quiet, save for the whispers, were it you who whispered? Guess it's too late to wonder now, right?" He pressured the wound in his belly harder, delaying the inevitable.

A voice whispered in his ear things bitter and then things sweet. Like a happy song played on a minor key.

"You were there when she was born, I remember. The dark moved when my wife drew her last breath. I thought nothing of it back then, overcome with grief as I was, but I remember."

The whispers grew like a song.

"You were there when I beat her the first time, she had kissed a boy. I heard you saying she'd be okay, that I loved her nonetheless, even though you believed it was all bullcrap."

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Suddenly the whispers halted as they felt what was coming next.

"You were there when that very boy helped her into an overdose, weren't you?"

The whispers remained silent.

"WEREN'T YOU?!" He screamed, his voice echoing in the darkness.

No response.

He chuckled. "I guess I have part of the guilt, but I didn't watch her die... Every word that hurts, every beating, I DID MY JOB AS A FATHER! WHAT DID YOU DO?!"

His voice echoed in the darkness and back to the man, the presence in still motion before him.

"And now you're alone. Just like me. Except I'm going away too, that boy made sure I'd take the easy way out and you're forced to watch now. You're forced to watch the very last part of the destruction you've conceived unfold."

The whispers shed a tear in the lone darkness, as the truth came crashing through the ceiling. What is it that binds men together once they've been torn apart? Our lives like waves on a dry lake, singing songs of longing, dead roses blooming.

The darkness before the man was all too real, as he drew his last breath the form that had first taken shape upon a birth died along with the last memory of its existence. The man himself was a complicated puzzle to solve, why would his shadow be any simpler? Maybe the reason he used his last breath to engage conversation with it suggests a great deal of importance to the shadow that followed him, maybe it does not. But we can no longer know, as the living are not allowed to understand or amend with the dead.

He died in the darkness, alone, and so did his self long before he drew his last breath.

A sad tale, and one of many.