“He isn’t coming back, whispered my head. He has to, sobbed my heart.” ~ Rupi Kaur

My love was milk and honey, but you were determined to starve.

It was all rose-gleaming glasses, whose tint shattered away the thousand and one reasons why it would never work, yet in the end you only needed to find one fragment of broken glass to talk yourself out of what was meant for you.

The swollen promises, iridescent in their longing, lapped like the gentle sea upon my shores. Those rolling waves continually brought you in—yet you feared them all the same.

And you took my hand and made me feel safe, and perhaps that was the most wicked deed of all—because in you I thought, perhaps, I had found someone I would never have to ask to stay.

Staying is what you wanted to do.

But the moon turned auburn, and she fell from the heavens in a million tears of failure. It was never enough.

I was never enough.

Passion filled your cup, and I let you drink from it continually, hoping that one day you would awaken to the man I had seen from the very first.

And though my wings were spread and I was free, I still hoped to build with you.

In the end, though, I suppose you wanted to starve—and I tired of giving. We can only be a candle for someone else for so long before we burn ourselves out.

I was your rose, but in time I withered, leaving you with only the faded pieces of what was once offered. And still my thorns somehow seemed to draw blood against your desire.

But none of it matters, because I was always just there.

I satisfied your physical longings, and you pretended you understood mine. Funny how two different pages can coexist within the same story and taste so eerily similar.

I was a warm body that left the door open for far too long, and it seems now that all of it was in vain—because all you say you ever saw was ease.

I made it too easy for you to love me in pieces; all the while I wanted the whole thing.

You let your bitter, playful tongue tell stories to others of how it was just sex and I was just there, and you convinced yourself of this, made it seem that I was nothing but a shadow.

And with those darkened whispers you erased enough of our history so that it could be forgotten, brushed away with the mistakes of yesterday.

None of it mattered—none of the promises or whispers of souls, none of the moments of growth or honestly—because in one swipe you shattered all of it.

You broke it. Even worse, I let you.

Perhaps my love was just too rich for you, or maybe you could never truly taste my flavor. But at least I know when I am lying to myself.

Something sparked between us much deeper than our indescribable physical attraction that always seemed to singe our reality—but maybe that’s the thing. Maybe it was too real, and we never knew how to believe in something we’d never felt before.

There was more to us than we ever said, and perhaps I didn’t always believe the words that spilled from your lips, but it seems now that you believed them enough for the both of us.

In the end, what we don’t accept seems to never have existed at all.

And now, I suppose we’ll both starve.

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Author: Kate Rose

Image: @maxfromtax on Instagram

Editor: Toby Israel

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