train stations

xiv.

Dear W,

I tried so hard to love you. I did love you, but I loved you the wrong way. Not the way a wife should love a husband.

I am to blame. I am broken. Maybe I'm not human.

My real crime, however, was not this lie. It was betrayal.

I never touched another soul. I loved you enough not to do that—I couldn't taint my body, but I tainted my mind. I may be broken, but I am not cruel. It was a betrayal of the emotional sort, not the physical. I don't know which is worse. Not loving you was wrong, but loving another—

But I had no chance.

She had blue eyes that washed over me like the tide crashing into the black night sky. She bewitched me with her voice (like siren-song) and her honey-drizzled lips. The way here hair tossed over her shoulder—I could never imagine another human like her.

She was my crime, but my curse was that I could not touch her.

You know who I mean.

She's gone now—on another planet, maybe.

And now, this stranger feels like a home to me, and I'm remembering that crime is deserving of punishment. I can't remember the sound of her laugh. Maybe that is punishment enough.

—Forgotten