This Is How You Lose Her

She was a troubled little thing that hung around in corners of odd places, staring like a mad man at passersby, putting stories into faces, and killing time with a kind of keenness I never quite understood. Young and dipped in folly, I fell in love with melancholy – she’d quote, not sure who that fool was though, she’d add, what an irony. It was always her, really. Not quite the kind of beautiful I grew up thinking would tie me down like a deeply planted oak in its hundredths, but beautiful nonetheless, in ways no words in me can muster up.

She was my ocean, the only thing I loved and feared so terribly deep; and I swam in her gravities and never again longed for the shore. My days started and rested in the endlessness that is her regal luster – and every time I thought of her, I hunger even more.

She was.

Then,

she was not.