There are stories that ache in the bones long after the marrow is gone, stories that hum beneath the skin, stubborn as an old scar, delicate as a fingerprint left on steamed glass. This is not one of those stories you tell at bars when the ice clinks and the hour’s grown so late it’s early. This is the kind you carry inside, silent and feral, the kind you dare not say aloud because the words would turn to glass and shatter on the floor.
She was a distance you could measure in highways and heartbreaks, a country apart, maybe two, but always just out of reach, like the last glow before the dawn.
I loved her, I loved her, I loved her. There is no softer truth.
She had hair the color of strawberries left too long in the sun, wild gold with streaks of secret red, catching the light and refusing to let go. The first time I saw her, she turned, and that curtain of strawberry-blonde spilled across her shoulder, so fluid, so reckless, it made the air taste sweeter.
If you ever want to know what hope smells like, try the first sharp scent of her hair as she passed. It’s real. It’s unfair. It’s addictive.
Her skin was a conspiracy of softness, milky and near-translucent, kissed here and there by freckles as if the night sky itself had tried to map the galaxies across her chest. I remember the way my fingers trembled the first time I touched that constellation, afraid to disturb the sacred geometry of a beauty too rare for daylight. In the half-light, every freckle was a note in a secret song, a song I hummed in the hollow of my chest for years after she’d gone.
I can still hear her laugh, a sound that always rose from somewhere deep and honest, a laugh that turned dark rooms golden. Her voice would sometimes break and splinter when she told me secrets late at night, the kind you whisper through the phone in a different city, heartbeat static laced between syllables.
Her words were velvet and wire, the timbre of someone who’d lost and dared to want again. I kept every voicemail, listened to it on loop, letting her voice vibrate through the cracked speakers so the ghost of her would fill the room when the world turned cruel and silent.
We made promises, the way dreamers do: Someday. Maybe. When. We never said forever…
But the world is built on the fault lines of what we want and what we’re given. Our days cracked and spilled across calendars we never shared, birthdays missed, anniversaries of things that never happened. I sent her letters I never mailed, held onto songs she’d never hear, pressed her memory into my palms until it left bruises no one else could see.
Our paths, though fleetingly, once intertwined. I remember the air around her, thick with the scent of cinnamon and something else, something sweet and dizzying that hinted at forbidden delights. It was a fragrance that promised an intoxication I could only dream of, a taste like night-blooming jasmine plucked from the florist's vibrant display just below her window.
See, she was taken, her heart already promised, her lips forever out of my reach. The unspoken word hung heavy between us, a chasm of desire and circumstance. She wouldn’t kiss me, and that simple, unyielding refusal etched itself into the very core of my being.
It's a truth I will never fully comprehend, a hunger that will forever remain unfulfilled. That memory, that poignant moment of almost, is a wound that time has refused to heal, a constant ache in the landscape of my heart.
I carry it with me, a testament to what could have been, a silent lament for a touch that was never given, a taste that was only ever imagined.
I tried to move on. You never really do. Some nights, I wake from dreams that taste like strawberry sunrise, her laughter in my ear, my hands tracing the shape of a future that never arrived. I roll over to an empty bed, press my face to the pillow, and breathe deep, wishing, for a moment, that perfume and memory could bring her back.
If you ever want to know what heartbreak feels like, it’s not the leaving. It’s the echo, the way the room still sings her name when the light changes. It’s the way you reach out in your sleep for someone who’s no longer there, the way you catch yourself humming the song you wrote together, only now it’s just you, and the song is lonelier, and so are you.
The world, in its vast indifference, will never honestly know her the way I did. They will never know the taste of her laughter, a pure, effervescent joy that was far sweeter and more intoxicating than any kiss could ever be. They will not see the constellations scattered across her skin, the intricate map of freckles that I traced with my fingertips in the quiet dawn, each one a tiny universe I yearned to explore.
The world will remain oblivious to the secret softness of her skin, yielding gently beneath trembling hands, a warmth that promised solace and whispered secrets in the depths of our shared silence. And they will never hear the tender vulnerability in the sound of her saying my name. This single word always hung in the air like a question, profound and beautiful, a question that would forever remain unanswered, its echoes reverberating in the chambers of my memory.
The world will never know that our love was a clandestine dance, performed in the hidden spaces between what was allowed and what was desired. It blossomed in the stolen hours, fragments of time snatched from the relentless march of obligations and expectations.
Our passion thrived in the taste of what could have been, a bittersweet flavor that lingered on our tongues long after we were forced to part. It was a love woven from unspoken promises and lingering glances, a masterpiece painted in the hues of longing and regret, a truth known only to us, a secret held tightly in the depths of our intertwined souls.
This isn’t just a sad story. It’s a sad song…
Played over and over, a mournful melody that winds its way through the forgotten corners of the heart. Each verse, a little softer than the last, a whisper of what once was, now muted by the passage of time.
The instrumentation, sparse and haunting, features a solitary cello, its deep, resonant tones mirroring the profound ache within. A faint piano accompanies, its notes like falling tears from a Billy Joel ballad, delicate and fleeting. The tempo is slow, a dirge for what has been lost, each beat a deliberate step towards a silent and empty future.
And yet, each memory, though more bitter for the loss, is also more beautiful for the distance it has traveled from its raw inception. We are echoes, she and I, not just faint reflections, but lingering vibrations in the air, notes stretched thin across the years, sustained by a fragile thread of remembrance.
The initial pain, sharp and immediate, has dulled with the passing seasons, transforming into a tender melancholy. It is a pain not of bleeding wounds, but of scar tissue, intricate and strangely beautiful in its resilience. Like ancient ruins, weathered by wind and rain, these memories stand as a testament to a grandeur that once was, now imbued with a quiet dignity.
The song continues, a lament that never truly ends, but rather fades into the vast quietness of memory. It is a private concert, played only for the heart that remembers, a symphony of longing and acceptance.
The silence between the notes is as significant as the notes themselves, allowing for reflection, for the slow, painful assimilation of absence.
And in that silence, a strange comfort is found in the quiet affirmation that even in loss, there is an enduring beauty, a testament to the profound connection that once bound two souls.
It is a song of sorrow, yes, but also a hymn to the indelible mark left behind, a melody that will forever resonate within the chambers of a solitary heart.
The harmony we once created has long since faded, leaving behind only these individual, almost imperceptible tones that resonate in the vast space between us. And I wonder, some mornings, as the first light slips through the blinds:
Did you ever taste the strawberry sunrise we never shared?
I did.
I still do.
Every time I remember.
- jspc ] Artist of Wanton [
Edge of Oblivion, Lips of Vengeance...
