u n r e q u i t e d • b o o k o n e ✓

six

I never forgot about you since then. Even after four years. I hate it. I had to pick myself up a lot. I became a teacher. You always told me that I was good with kids.

Before you went back to her and we were still together you told me that you wanted to be something beautiful. You told me I was different. And a long time ago, you told me that honesty was what you valued the most and you told me that you wouldn't say something you didn't mean. That was a promise, and everything after that was a promise. And you broke every single one of them, but I let you. So I'm at fault.

You gave me anxiety attacks and I thought it was love. You wrote me sweet poems and I thought it was love. You told me you loved me and I thought it was love. You came back to me even when you were with her and I thought it was love.

Maybe I was wrong when I told you that she was using you. Maybe you did love her, and maybe she even loved you back. And maybe you've got what she wants and she's got what you lack. But she broke your heart without even trying. And she painted you a new color and left before the paint was finished drying. How can you trust a person who never stays? How could I have ever trusted you?

You were right about one thing. Nicholas. He is beautiful. I would know because he just so happens to be in my first grade class. It's hard for me to look at him without seeing you and her.

He tells me about you.

About how you're his real dad and you're with his real mom. He tells me that you and her argue a lot, but he also says that he knows you two love each other. He says that he loves you and her, but he loves his parents a lot more. The parents who raised him.

I know that I no longer feel hatred or love towards you, but I don't think that I could ever face you. I'm married now. Have been for about a year.

He writes poems that are meant for me. He whispers I love you's that are meant for me. He always comes back to me, and never to someone else. And I know that I love him, because when I first met him, I finally stopped sleeping on your side of my bed.