Love Letter

Today I looked at photos of you from when we first met. You are smiling and the smile reaches your eyes. I see you leap off the screen and into spontaneous nights out. You are laughing the kind of laugh no one can fake and everyone’s eyes on you are just as adoring as mine. You are beautiful. I am still in love with the man in those photos. I want to kiss his lips, hold his hand, skip down the sidewalk with him. I want the whole world to know that he is mine.

And whenever someone asks to see a photo of you, I show them a photo of him.

But you are not him, anymore. I flip through the years of our relationship and I see your face get more tired. Your smiles these days never make it past your lips. That laugh is nowhere to be found. In its place there is instead a realization that life is not as beautiful and good as you were promised. Instead, it is hard, and unhappy and it never seems to end.

I am not in any of those photos but I am still there. In the emptiness of your eyes and the set of your smile. In the increasing isolation. There are no more adoring eyes, just mine behind the camera, sucking you dry.

I was in love with you. But I took that love and I took your beautiful self and I chewed it up. I clawed out all of your beauty to keep myself alive. I stole it, chunk by chunk, and the you that I love gave it to me, too. But unlike you, I can’t hold on to sunshine. I take it and I crush it between my teeth, I grind it up, and I swallow it and even though it keeps me alive, it dies inside me.

I am sorry I ate your sunshine. I am sorry I turned you into a shell. You have no more sunshine left to give.

I loved you. And so I ate you. Now we are both alone.