Love Letters and Library Books

I used to be a girl who wrote love letters.

Volumes and volumes of text, finding glory in every detail, capturing every stimulus of the senses. I was my life’s own historian, obsessively recording documentation of the beauty and brutality of it all.

I once wrote stunning love letters.

I wrote in searing detail of the rush of seemingly boundless freefall, of the lush colors sprung up from fertile ground coaxed forth with rainfalls of kisses down my spine. Every word served as tactile evidence that this thing, this “love” in fact exists.

And then I wrote of a different kind of falling just as endless, the bleak landscape of every heartbreak painted with tears and pain; of magicians’ beguiling a willing audience with smoke filled illusions.

Because we all want to believe, don’t we?

I still have them all, stored in the mental and physical libraries of my life. Sometimes, I even crack the dusty bindings of these volumes and read them.

It all reads like a police report to me now.

In every photo now hangs mental crime scene tape, Hi-liter © yellow marking off where some emotional violence took place. Every musing and dream, precise and detailed, each marveling at skin and muscle and bone and barely perceptible flaw are but bullet points, tiny pebbles paving the road towards inevitable conclusion. It is evidence. A victim’s account of unforeseen violation at the hands of perpetrators they knew.

I don’t write love letters anymore.

Now they are just words I read, detached from the feelings like I’m observing them in a museum. Every description seems almost scientific, one dimensional. They are hazy as though stared at from a distance on a hot day. Where once stood epic monuments to joy and love and promise are merely tombs encapsulating the life bound in the paragraphs.

I once was a girl who wrote love letters.

Now, I write this.