Book Of Lies

• chapter nine •

"This love is tainted, I need you and I hate it"

"I need you"

I forgot who I was.

I think I only started to remember when I flushed you out of my system. Slowly, painfully then; finally.

I remember the day everything changed. When your calls were white noise. When your pictures became flashing images that were only present in the present and left there. When your presence was a faint shadow and no longer an ever present apparition that haunted me.

I remember when the moving van pulled up. It's engine choppy and it's bright red paint peeling at all corners. A beacon of hope as it became filled with pieces of memories that would move on to be renewed. You watched as the final piece of me away from you was put away. I remember you taking my hands in yours. Your eyes trained on the creases and lines on my face. Memorizing them like a road map.

"Evelyn"

You didn't meet my eyes when I opened my heavy lids. Instead you looked down at my hands that you thought were brick when they should've been treated like fragile glass.

"I need you."

Three words that would've changed my no longer fragile mind had it been said before my towers of stone had been built, before the coliseum around my heart had been constructed, before the gladiators that protected my emotions had been trained.

Instead, I simply took my hands out of yours.

And walked away.

Because, I didn't deserve someone who couldn't tell the difference between coal and diamond.

I believed you. I just didn't care.