“I’ll write a book about how much I love you,” I told you all those years ago. That was when you loved me, too. Years have gone by, and the more I think about it, the more I feel, I don’t want to write that book. I don’t want to write about us. There’s no story. At least, not something that wasn’t written countless times before we were even born.
Love was a trampled carpet, stamped over and over with shoes and feet of all shapes and sizes. We weren’t anything new or unique, as much as we would have believed at the time. Even in the ending of things, it turned out exactly like an old poem would, with an abrupt hyphen, and a last line that felt too short for something as important as the last word.
I wonder if I’ll ever write about you beyond these fragments straight out of my head, and booze or exhaustion. I wonder if you’ll ever read them. I’m not going to write that book, though. I’m sorry. I just wanted you and the world to know that. Love was a stale prompt, an over-celebrated festival that had lost its charm, a mediocre piece of fiction, at best. The only love that was worth writing about was the one that stuck, the one that stood the test of time and chaos, and I have none of it to talk about.
Even if I did, when you have a love like that, you barely have time to tell anyone about it. You’re too busy being in love, being giddy with the overwhelm of everything lovely in your life—squirrels surfing on rainbows and all. You know what I’m talking about. We’ve all seen it. Some of us have felt it. Fewer have managed to keep it. I aimed to be in those few.
So, I won’t write about you or me or us or anything that happened simply because everyone knows this: love is silent and patient and kind, and love stays, and love tries; it is heartbreak that howls the loudest on a cold winter night. We were just wolves hungry for love, us writers, tired of leading the pack astray. We were fickle. We didn’t write about love when we truly loved someone. We kept it all to ourselves, for ourselves.
We knew we had howled long enough.