a quiet love story (older prose)

i know you know how it feels to stir in the mornings with your heart anchored to your bed; sunlight gleaming on your face as if to reassure you, this is okay. you make headway, finding yourself in front of a mirror that only offers up a distorted reflection of you. you never meet it’s gaze. mornings collapse into afternoons. the day does not resist bleeding into night; by five pm, the darkling sky hides any traces of warmth except for the sparse light of a handful stars, a million or so kilometers away.

i used to pen you poems, a bakers dozen or so a day, and litter them throughout the city, hoping somehow, somewhere you would find one. maybe at the library, tucked away in some dusty book that you pick up because the thought of a book dying into obscurity like that stirs empathy in you. or perhaps, at the bus station, neatly positioned in the shelter in front of the bench in the exact spot where the light of the lamp-post could never reach. maybe, the wind pities me and offers help, picking up the crumpled paper and depositing it near your mailbox. i had hoped somehow, someway, you’d find one.

you would read it, acknowledge it, maybe throw into an old box of your stuff and forget about it. years later, maybe out of nostalgia, maybe out of boredom, you go through them, coming across that poem, reading it again for the very first time. smiling, you tear it up and throw it away.

that was the best scenario I could hope for.