Waking up

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It was far too early for the sun to wake him now. After long days and even longer nights, nothing felt like it was worth doing anymore. Waking up felt like a pain now, and seeing the sun no longer warmed his heart; it annoyed him. As his eyes fell upon the sleeping figure next to him, his heart sank and filled with dread. There was yet another thing that had changed, he realised. To him, love was not what it used to be.

Before, waking up had been beautiful. It had been the soft kiss of sunlight that he passed on to his favourite person in the entire world, carefully waking her from her dreams before walking into the kitchen and preparing breakfast. All of that seemed so far away now. The throbbing sensation in his chest only increased when he noticed that those feelings were long gone. Looking at her now, sleeping so innocently, all he could think about was how naïve she looked; how naïve he had been. His heart no longer jumped at the sight of her, it sank.

The way she would brush her hair behind her ear all the time no longer made him grin, it made him frown in annoyance. Before, it had made him feel special when she blushed at his words, and now he couldn’t bear to look at her face for longer than a minute without noticing all those flaws he had once found beautiful.

Looking at her now, she seemed so childlike; so small, stubborn and complicated. She appeared to him like a puzzle he had tried, for years, to solve- only to find it unsolvable. He did not hate her. He could never hate her; but the initial spark, the warmth of her presence, all of that was gone, leaving nothing but a void where his feelings should be.

Perhaps now was the first time he was truly waking up.

He was waking up from a dream, and thrown back to reality, and reality was an evil, ugly thing that he could not leave again. Somewhere along the way, he had dragged her into it, and now they both had to suffer. But the ugly part of all this was, that a tiny voice within him had decided she deserved it. A tiny voice inside of him truly hated her, and everything she stood for, because she was the literal embodiment of all he had once been and no longer was. She was everything he had lost, except he hadn’t lost her yet.

He sat there, waiting; he sat there, knowing he would lose her. And he couldn’t stop it.

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