I never had a favourite colour before I saw the shade of green that wrapped itself around his pupils like a forest surrounding a bottomless pit. I could see deep sadness and a suffocated joy within his eyes. I couldn't describe the way those sad eyes lit up the first time they fell in my direction if I knew every word to every language. He bore his soul in his eyes, an open book for all to read. I don't think anyone took the time to read between the lines before I came into his life. There was so much he hid away, so much sorrow. One glance into that soul of his and I could see he'd been suffering for way too long.
I tried to repair him, put Humpty-Dumpty back together, but it proved impossible. There were some pieces missing that could never be found and put back into place again. I felt hopeless and worthless because I couldn't help this beautiful man with soul-bearing eyes see himself as beautiful and be happy. And one day he was gone out of my life and I didn't blame him for leaving. I was overbearing. I loved him so much that I became more in love with loving than the person I claimed to feel so strongly for.
I remember waking up and looking at the empty bed beside me and crying. All day I kept convincing myself that he was in the shower and then that he'd gone to work, and after work he must've gone out to the bar with his friends and crashed at one of their houses because how could he leave me? But in my heart I knew the truth above the loud lie I'd silently screamed at myself over the first few days that he was gone.
We'd had a fight the night before he left. He told me to stop feeling sorry for him, to stop trying to make him happy, that he loved me more than anything but love wasn't and would never be a cure-all. He was too damaged. There was too much pain in his heart for a quick coat of love to successfully paint over it. The anguish would always seep through the cracks of my love. His sadness was incurable. He told me that one day that sadness would kill him and that he didn't want me to feel like it was my fault. He wanted me to love him, not to be his cure, because there was no cure.
He never told me the root of his sadness, only that he'd was diagnosed with depression when he was 8. He did say, in a note he left on the kitchen table before he left, that I brought a brilliant shining light into his dark existence. I gave him a taste of Heaven that he felt he didn't deserve.
He'd send me letters every now and then, assuring me that he was doing fine, that he was still alive and not to worry. Then the letters stopped after 5 years. I thought that he'd given up.
I got married and had two children, all within the 5 years that his letters still had graced my mailbox, and I loved my kids and my husband but not as much as I loved that sad man that I'd presumed to be dead. He'd sneak into my dreams and quiet-time thoughts. He was always there, whispering in the back of my mind. I couldn't let him go. I was numb to everything, but put on a happy face that didn't give way to the pain inside. Things went on like that for 3 years.
I wrote to him at least once a week, but my letters were always returned to me. I tried to call him, but found that his number now belonged to someone else. I tried to hide my sorrow but my husband knew better. He asked why I stopped getting letters from my pen-pal, and I told him the truth. That my penpal was an ex that I cared deeply for. He tried to comfort me, convince me that he was still alive and that I shouldn't worry. Maybe he'd gotten married himself, maybe he even had a baby on the way and couldn't see holding onto a past love any longer. I cried when my husband proposed that scenario. I would rather have thought of him as dead than that he forgot about me. And maybe that's incredibly selfish to say, but I didn't care. That man was my world. I was the Heaven to his Hell for 5 years. It didn't make sense that he could forget about me when the thought never crossed my mind to try and forget about him.
And then, one crisp, autumn evening, he was on my doorstep. I cried when I opened the door and saw him smile at me after all this time. It was a genuine smile, not like all the smiles he'd forced in the past to try and assure me, and everyone else, that he'd power through and keep hanging on. There was no pain in his features in that moment, but I quickly realized that it was just my eyes giving me what I wanted to see and that he was still struggling with himself and waging a war with sadness.
