All Perfect Things Must End

You wouldn’t have known me a year ago.

Dingy brown hair and too-big hazel eyes fixated on the floor. Baggy T-shirts and jeans, fluffy cotton jacket hoods, mud-soaked sneakers and dark-rimmed glasses on a body that impresses no one. These aren’t the traits of someone you notice. Especially someone as peculiar as you.

Me. A freak, an outsider. Easily forgotten.

You. A whimsical angel, beautiful and impulsive, a bundle of child-like wonder and desire for life.

A burst of color in a cloudy sea of gray, or a shining, snowy dove diving into puffy clouds while flying above fallen trees in a shadowy forest in flames.

Someone who finds the world easy to fall in love with.

The moment we locked eyes for the first time, the cosmos shattered. It shouldn’t have been. This world was formed in such a fashion to prevent something as insane as our meeting from ever happening but yet…here we were. Me, a miniscule cell trapped between two crippling glass slides shyly gazing up at you, and you, a microscope examining me closely at full power. I should have been intimidated, but I wasn’t. I was just as intrigued as you were, if not more so. Never had something as mesmerizing as you ever taken a glance at me, let alone stared me down and picked apart the strings of my knitted guise and coaxed out a hidden part within me that wanted to smile and laugh and not be afraid. But you did.

And something wonderful happened.

We connected.

Hours passed like seconds when we were together. The heat of the moment flooded my heart and boiled my blood, filling me with a warmth I have never known. Every day was a flooding bubble bath of joy and splendor, and I never wanted a single moment to end.

But all good things must end. Even all beautiful, majestic, perfect things must end too, apparently.

A single glance was all it took. One look at her.

No one could compare to you, but she was close. An auburn deity glistening with love and excitement and fearlessness. A chalky sketch of a fairy tale princess come right off the page of a storybook. She was all the things that fed your soul.

And so, you listened to your heart.

But what was I supposed to do when the love I was so dutifully following was chasing after another? Continue dragging along behind you, my muscle aching with the weight of what we lost? Of what I once had that was so wrongfully stolen from me by the wings of false love?

Or suffer in forced silence, so as not to disturb your newfound peace?

Forgotten.

Ignored.

Alone…

I should have seen it coming. I should have constructed walls all around me, fully equipped with guards armed with the most disastrous weapons imaginable to protect me from even the worst pain. I should have hidden from the world in a fortress and simply daydreamed about how I imagined humanity to be, painted portraits on the walls of all the people I would never meet and hosted conversations with them. They would ask how I am and I would not be forced to say I’m fine to hide a forbidden secret.

But even if I had taken cautionary measures, I’d still be lying here on the floor, bleeding from a wound no surgeon could stitch. Even if I had saved myself, you’d still be galloping in meadows of sunflowers, delicately holding her hand and giggling in the yellow sunshine.

You wouldn’t have known me a year ago.

And you’ll forget me a year from now.