once upon a time, you were every story in my head. you were fantasies woven during day and prose written at 3AM. i saw so much poetry in you, in everything you did. that was a sure sign that i felt something for you, that my love ran deeper than plain infatuation and crushing.

i wrote about how your smile could light up the darkest of days; my sunshine, my flashlight. i wrote about how beautiful i thought the callouses on your hands were, i wrote about how your flaws were never imperfections to me. i wrote about the lyrics you remind me of. i wrote your name in cursive on the back of my hand along with words of promise and endearment. i scribbled you through the margins of my notebook with poetry and song.

but oh, it wasn’t all just fairy dust and wanderlust.

my pen bled ugly words, rage and heartbreak and jealousy. prose after prose of how you’d leave me in the rain, how you always made me feel like i was either too much or not enough. they were angry taps to the keyboard. pens tearing in to paper. the horrors of them made e.e cummings turn in his grave, the curses of young love would have made shakespeare proud.

you knew about that. you knew about how i meticulously wove words together for you, words that would have made other people fall in love. and not once did you appreciate them; you threw aside my gifts of poetry and prose like they weren’t about you. like they didn’t mean a thing.

if you read them, you would’ve seen how much i adored you. if you read them, you would’ve recognized a love so unprecedented, unrivaled, untouchable. but you didn’t. you never got past the first stanza, the first paragraph, the first three words before giving me a half-hearted thanks and changing the topic.

and so i started to write about you less. my words began to lose it’s substance, my phrases got shorter, my metaphors making less sense. and you didn’t notice. you never noticed how you slowly faded from the thing the one thing that mattered more to me than anything in the whole world.

you faded, then you were gone completely.

i no longer write about you. wait, no, that’s a lie: i no longer want to write about you. i hope this is the last time i do, the last set of words i’d dare to pull together for you. you don’t deserve to know how i feel about you, you don’t deserve my poems or my words anymore. god knows my words are all i have, and i can’t love you if you don’t learn to love them. i’m sorry; call it selfish, or unfair. but these words, these words, my words. how can i write about you if you don’t– if you never– valued the best gift i had to offer?

you’re now just some left-over papers that i keep under my bed, one day to open and read with tinges of nostalgia, but never to re-write again.