Love is stronger than pride

The house is quiet and simultaneously full of familiar sounds. She walks to the kitchen where the echoes of the outside world transport her to a familiar yet unrecognisable time of afternoon streets and distant voices. The kitchen buzzes with refrigerator waves. A gleam of light, passing through the window, highlights a speck of dust in the air. 

She leans onto the balcony, touching the cold surface to try to find herself in the present moment. Her mind is constantly jumping through dimensions in those lazy afternoons when the house seems like a receptacle of outside energies and a trigger to time travelling.

Her gaze lingers in a sheet of paper stuck to the refrigerator door. A poem she wrote and that a magazine published. She has stared proudly at her name in capital letters in the bottom of the poem many times before. He asked if it had been written about him and she denied.

'It's a love poem. It's about love.' she said. He looked at her as if she was losing her mind. 'Just because I wrote a love poem, it doesn't mean you were the source of inspiration.'

Her heart stings when she remembers how her love was a source of self-esteem for him, when ironically it seemed to mean very little most of the time.

'So who is it about?' he insisted and she laughed half-heartedly.

'You don't get it, do you?'

He shrugged, apparently amused with himself. Him who didn't write poems, him who copied other people's words for special written occasions, him who didn't trust his own words. Well, how could she trust them herself?

Outside a cloud covers the sun momentaneously and the curtain of light vanishes from the kitchen leaving her in the shadows.

photo from everystockphoto.com