A short story inspired by the Chicago Art Insitute's Van Gogh Exhibit, which runs until May 10, 2016.
They say that Van Gogh ate yellow paint in a desperate attempt to feel happiness inside.
I covered the canvases of my heart with every sunrise I saw in your eyes and every golden smile you gave me.
I stand on the Addison red line platform where the freezing Chicago winter cuts through my coat. I think I hear the lilt of your voice in the distance, but it is only the winds of my past coming to taunt me once more.
I find you in the flowers I buy myself each week and the bitter lemon slices I drop into the water bottle you got me. I find you in the stubborn shoelace on the sneaker you double knotted for me months ago.
It finally came loose.
The stars will always say your name back to me, reminding me of the love we once had and subsequently lost. You were once my dream and now I have forgotten how to. You dwell in the depths of my heart, a festering wound I cannot stop licking.
I have tried to fumigate your memories from my mind but all it does is spread a rampant plague throughout my body, eating me alive. I feel your lips on my kiss as I become intoxicated on the non-stop smiling and eternal love we so fervently promised each other.
I wrote about you constantly because I thought it would be enough to make you stay. As long as you lived in the words I bled onto the page we would never truly die. But in the springtime as the world was beginning, we were ending.
We kept running through the revolving doors of "I love you, I hate you, I need you, forget you," and became so dizzy we fell apart.
I'm watching film reels in my head of you whispering you love me so that no one else hears, laughing at the dreams I admit to you during the stillness of the night, and refusing to visit me when I can't bring myself to get out of bed that day.
I am throwing popcorn during the scenes of you choosing every activity we do because your stubborn voice mutes all my opinions.
I can no longer feel the iron grip of your flippant words clenching their jaw around my heart. I am no longer frightened of your blood stained teeth and dripping smile as you say no one will ever love me like you do.
I am no longer trapped in your arms in what I used to think were loving hugs but were really a cage to keep me hopeless and dependent. I am no longer waking up in cold sweats, terrified of what my heart is capable of loving.
It comes down to this, the moment where I must choose whether to let you or I go. I used to choose you over me in any decision I ever made and this time was no different.
I keep scrawling "Remember me in your dreams" and planting a big red kiss on paper menus from your favorite Thai restaurant and sending them in bottles down Lake Michigan.
But as much as it hurts me, I still find myself leaving the porch light on for the version of you I loved so dearly to find his way home to me.
For some reason, I am still hoping we are dancing together in an alternate reality where we were able to find happiness within each other.
I am still eating my yellow paint.
