The Writer Who Loved You

I was a sentence in your life while you could have filled a full book in mine.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Summer doesn’t mean a thing without you.

Or that’s how I felt, anyway, after those weeks in July when I fell in love with you.

You were the one who inspired the words to rise up out of my throat, and I had no choice but to let the flow turn to paper, screen, whatever medium I had for it.

You told me I had a future with the words I wrote, and I believed you. You were the magic ingredient to make me start to believe a little in myself. You never asked for anything in return — no matter the whims and the ways of my overly active brain.

I gifted you with stories, thinking the way to your heart would mean ink-and-paper promises. You accepted them, praised them, and even let a little of them inside your world. I was glad to have the reader, yet I never asked you what the stories really meant to you. Maybe I was afraid to hear the answer.

But then, as these things happen, we drifted apart. It no longer felt like a dance to send you story after story. Your silence grew, and the space between us widened till it felt like we were in different worlds entirely.

Later, I’d ask you to read a story for me again. Maybe it was a test. Maybe it was just my mad grasp of trying to recapture a flame before it went back out, embers dying in the rain.

You came back to me with ho-hum words. “It was just a short story,” you said, giving the equivalent of shrugging your shoulders. I wilted a little inside. With just one phrase of your own, you had made it clear you no longer thought my words were magic.

I buried the words, the stories, and wondered just what the hell I’d been doing.

You don’t know how hard I cried to realize I had lost the tenuous connection with you. If I couldn’t woo you with a small tale, what hope did I have to grasp your heart once more? The words had been what had joined us in the first place, and I didn’t know where we would end up without them.

But I hadn’t taken into account how you’d changed. You were no longer the carefree spirit, at ease with the world, that I had known years past. Something had…