This is my sixth short story in the "Romance and All That" section. "His Eyes were a Poem" is a short story about projection and disappointment, capturing the pain of unrequited love and the clash between idealization and reality. It explores the crushing weight of expectations and the longing for a love that never fully materializes.

Short Story - His Eyes Were a Poem

Frozen in place, I stood there as if time itself had stopped, while the poem was fixated on me. Never in my life had I felt such insignificance in my own existence.

While my desires and admirations were fighting over what was left of me, his face was expressionless. The eyes that harboured the warmest of my feelings were cold, like those of a killer.

While my world was crumbling beneath me, the poem was drilling holes into my whole being while still looking through me. I felt the kind of pain that you can't express merely with words—it takes wine, blood, and tears. It takes a shrill voice screaming into the void of solitude.

It takes the kind of howl that only a lover who has lost could make.

But I couldn't look away from the murderers just yet. I sunk into the void of them. I got lost in the maze of the black pearls. There was this lingering love in me that wouldn't go out, a lonely candle in the catacombs of my portrayals.

And while I was there, I listened for a howl, a howl of a human that screams for love. But there were none to be heard. Maybe I had had one too many and become deaf. Or maybe they were whispered in a language I couldn't comprehend. Or just maybe, it was not the time for us.

In his whole demeanour, there was an absence of something I couldn't pinpoint. And this alone could have killed me.

This alone would have been enough.

At this point, my love for him was standing on the edge of a cliff. It would have been enough to send it down into the cold-cold sea and drown it with the cruelty of reality. It would have been enough. But gods never had mercy on mere humans.

As I could feel the words in the back of my throat suffocate me, the poem had finished its studies and gotten bored.

He had decided to let the prey have a little more air before crushing the lump in her chest, a little more hope that I was clinging to as if my whole existence depended on it.

And I prayed for his hands to have a little more mercy. But as soon as the prayer left my lips, it was imminent how minuscule I was beside his holy grace. With coals burning holes into my skin, I was begging for more fire, more passion, more love. But he wasn't exactly the lover I had dreamed him to be.

His hands were not the gentlest of strokes, like that of a brush I had imagined them to be. And I thought that he must have been on a path to destroy me if it meant that he could survive another night. He must have been lonely and tired.

There had to be a reason for this coldness.

And I couldn't help but wonder, who was he longing for? Who was that very being that broke him into these thousand shards that cut me? And why was he portraying this pain onto me?

I would have loved him, and I would have cared for him, but I was just a girl with her head in the clouds.

I must have been one of many on the spree of murders. There had to be more blood on his hands, there just had to be more. There had to be more...

The little hope I had left for his lips at this point was crushed by the roughness of his and the little emotion they were carried out with. With his hands in my hair, it was almost painful how much force it took for him to draw out the air from my lungs, the blood from my lips, and the faith in love I was clinging to.

The love that I once held on a pedestal now made my stomach churn.

I wanted nothing more than to vomit it out and be rid of it. I wanted it gone, and I wanted this pain to be over.

He might have been the God, but I wasn't his Goddess. And he made it known with every thrust of his hips. He made it known in the way he turned his head whenever I held onto the hope that something in the eyes had changed.

With tears stuck in my throat, I swallowed him as if it was my last resort to be adored. But all that I got was a smirk, and him leaving me on the bed, vulnerable as he slid on his clothes.

So it was done, so I was dead, and I was just another corpse for him to throw into the pile of lovers. All I could do was watch him leave.

And all that I could find the strength for was curling up on the bed in a foetal position, cursing all the Gods I had ever known.