She walked through life, alone.
Content.
Happy with smelling
the concrete, fresh after the rain.
With watching
the sunset from her bedroom window.
With picking
flowers from a garden, stuffing it in her breast pocket.

With cooking alone, enjoying a meal for one on her two seater couch, with a glass of wine.
Falling asleep with Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde late at night.
She was happy, content,
she always felt like something might be missing but it never gave her reason to fear, to put her life on pause.

Then
He came along and showed her what it was like to live beside someone,
to share.
He taught her how to walk in the rain,
he taught her how to breathe,
how to feel the sun on her skin,
how to enjoy the feeling left in her fingertips.

He taught her how to be the flower and not just steal its glory,
how to be someone,
others stole glory from.

He taught her how to care, how to love.
He shared her two seater and her wine.
She learned to cook for two and not just one.

At night her poetry lay untouched at her bedside table.
His voice, his warmth - her remedy.
Suddenly, she felt the hole start to fill.
She loved it most when he made her laugh and when he smiled.

Her favourite was when he used his surname in the place of her own.
When he would talk of their future,
their kids,
their home.
She felt safe and strangely at home wherever he was.
She was happy.

Then
One day, he became different.
Stopped talking of their future,
their home,
their life.
He stopped sharing her two seater,
stopped holding her at night.
Without warning or notice - she was alone.

She forgot how to breathe and how to feel the sun,
how to be a flower,
how to fall asleep at night,
the hole she barely felt before became bigger and bigger,
and that was all she could feel,
the emptiness,
the pain,
the coldness that consumed her.
She forgot how to laugh.
She found her own future to be a blurred sight.
She couldn't remember how to love, how to care, how to feel.

She lost sight of everything.
She couldn't find her way back to where she was.
Everything felt out of place, out of context.
She never wanted to love again.
She feared she never would.