I Have Loved

I Loved Her

He had hoped that he could live without her. He had wanted to continue to breath without her sunlight filling his life. Love without her being beside him.

But he couldn’t.

Everything had changed. Everywhere he looked, traces of her flowed in a constant pattern of loneliness and bittersweet memories. Their friends and family, they remembered her. They spoke of her so often…There was no escape. Not anymore.

He’d known from the start. From the first time he had seen her, standing there gazing into the midnight sky, he knew. She was the one. She was the one that would claim him, heart and soul. And then he would break. Shatter into a thousand tiny pieces. He just never expected it to happen so soon.

He had tried to run from the memories. Tired to run from her, but she was always there. He would try to lose his thoughts in the depths of a bottle, in the arms of some common woman he had found, but her face remained.

And oh those eyes!

Oh those cruel, cruel eyes! Those eyes that made him pray to whatever god or demon there was to help him. To let her come back to him. But she was never coming back. Not in a physical form anyway. But in his mind, there she was. Gazing at him from over his shoulder in the mirror. Smiling at his pain. And she would cry. And oh how her tears would sting him! How they would throw him into rage for not being able to protect her against the world!

And then one day, the images were gone. He had nothing left anymore. He could not cry for his lost love, he could not mourn any longer. He may have seemed like a heartless bastard, but he was still human. He still had a heart. A heart that could break and a heart that had broken. And now, now it would positively shatter if he had to continue another day without her.

It was her brother that found the letter. The only one besides himself that knew her. And he understood to a point. He had known what it was like after she had gone. He knew his pain. He knew what she had meant to him.

No one else would tie the two together. No one else would see what he saw. He would mourn the loss of not only his sister, but that man that may have one day been his brother.

And as he watched the letter burn in the grate, those words stood out even among the flames. Even after the scrap had been reduced to ash, those words that were not so unlike those of his beloved sister continued to play out across the wood.

I loved her