It has been more than six years and I think you will always be the love story I never got to live. I remember the day we first met, you were wearing your favorite red dress and your hair blew gently in the breeze of the warm summer evening. There was a kind of yellowish, peaceful hue to the sky that day. The cracked walls of the old buildings and even their dull, peeling paint looked beautiful. 

You were new here at the time. You didn't know how it's always summer here or how it barely ever rains here or how much I hate it here because I feel like I'm standing at a train station, watching people come and leave and no one stays long enough to actually stay forever. It's like dreaming that the next train will be the one that will get you out of here but knowing it isn't. You loved it here. You loved how everything was green and everything was beautiful. It was like the Garden of Eden. You didn't notice how the people hunched their backs like they were trying to disappear into themselves, how the roads were hot like burning coal, or how even the trees bent their heads trying to hide in their own shade.

I was never that good at writing stories but I still write you poetry that you will probably never read. Maybe they will stay between the pages of my old books with the flowers I pressed between my favorite parts. Maybe one day they will turn to dust and maybe with them, the last of our memories will too. I hope, however, that even when we have turned to soil in our graves, someone finds them and falls in love with our unrequited love.

People have come and gone and people have come to stay but none of them ever felt like you did. Maybe I hoped that someday a train would pull up and someone half as wonderful as you were would step out. Maybe I hoped that with every person in whom I try to find glimpses of you, I could fool myself into believing you were back but with every moment that has passed, I believe I have fallen further and further in love with you. To be honest, I hate you for leaving as much as I don't blame you for it. Some days I hate you so much that I actually believe it.

I remember the day you told me you were leaving. You were smiling so hard and I felt something drop in my stomach, a deep kind of despair but so much more than just that. It felt like someone had just wrenched my guts out of my stomach. Maybe I hated the fact that even you didn't want to stay here with me forever, at the train station. Maybe I envied the fact that you had a choice. I don't know when it happened but you looked through the eyes of Eve and you realized how much The Garden of Eden was like Hell.