Love Fades With Bygone Days Chapter 09
From that day on, Tomas stopped sleeping.
Every night, he sat alone in the living room, staring blankly at a single lamp.
He tried turning it off.
But in the darkness, the images in his mind only grew sharper.
Me, curled up in the corner of my wrecked apartment.
The scars on my arms.
The stinging impact of his hand against my cheek.
He opened the photo album on his phone.
It was filled with pictures of Alessia, pictures of Leo, pictures of the three of them together.
He scrolled all the way to the beginning and realized he only had three photos of me.
One was a candid shot. I was in the kitchen making pasta, my hair clipped up messily, caught in the middle of a yawn.
One was from when we had just started dating. I was smiling, radiant and happy, his arm draped over my shoulder.
The last one was from when my depression had been at its worst.
Alessia, at her wit’s end, had secretly taken it and sent it to him.
In the photo, I was painfully thin. My face was sallow, my lips cracked and dry.
At the time, he’d only thought that I had let myself go after he left, that I’d become ugly.
Now, looking at it again, his chest seized.
I hadn’t just “become” like that.
He had pushed me there, piece by piece.
Not long after, Alessia left with Leo.
She packed her things without a single argument, without a single tear.
Before walking out the door, she placed her keys on the entryway table and said only one thing.
“We both wronged her.”
Tomas didn’t try to stop her.
Deep down, he knew he had never really loved Alessia.
