Twenty-Eight Stamps [#Wattys2017] || ✓

the f i r s t letter

Dear Hunter,

It's been three years. Three years, and I still cry myself to sleep most nights. Three years, and I'm not over you, and I still can't forget about you and everything we did, and I've turned to drinking to try and take the pain away. Even that doesn't help a lot of the time.

It's February now, and it's snowing outside. It's the second anniversary of the month we confessed our shared love.

What you did to me was indescribable. The amount of pain, the amount of heartbreak you caused me was something beyond anything I would have thought imaginable. I gave you my heart and you tore it up in the same fashion I will probably tear up these letters later, leaving a million shreds of it on the ground at your feet.

Yet, Hunter, that's not the problem.

The problem is that I still love you with all the tiny pieces.

You said you loved me, too. You told me repeatedly, when we lay together on the couch at your mother's house, when we walked along the coast at night, and when we ate picnics and drunk cheap wine in the sand dunes.

Why did you lie, Hunter? Because you never loved me. Not once. It was all a facade, it was all a performance, and now I'm the one who is paying the price. I guess it's my fault for getting so attached to you.

It's like I was a crumbling building, slowly falling to the ground, and you were the defences put in place to hold me up and support me. But mow you're gone, and I've crashed to the floor and been left to pick myself up with no hope of restoring myself again. All because of you.

You never loved me back.

I can see that now. I was stupid to ever think you did.

But, Hunter Cross,

I'm still in love with you.

All my love, always,
Maia.