After what felt like hours sitting in silence, staring out over the park, lost in the chaos raging inside my head, I finally pushed myself up from the bench only to drop my bag. Papers and files spilled out, the wind grabbing a few and sending them dancing in front of me like tiny, reckless ballerinas.
I didn’t move.
I just stood there, rooted in place, weighed down by a sadness so hollow it felt bottomless.
“He’s just a dumb guy, Penn. He doesn’t understand who and what he had,” my best friend’s soft voice pulled me from the hypnotic spin of the papers on the wind, a sad symphony with no conductor.
“Just a dumb boy who stole over half of my life though,” I whispered, dropping to my knees to gather the rest. The pages of my notebook flipped open, the wind teasing them until the ink bled across the blue lines, a love story smudged in grief. A webof lies, a side dish of catfish, and the dangerous allure of a dating app.
It’s all starting to look like a glitch.
The first lie, if you can call it that, was the moment I started writing this story. Page one of a narrative that blurred the lines between confession and revenge. A tale not just about heartbreak, but about the shattering of a soul.
Let me be clear.
This story doesn’t have a happy ending.
It was supposed to.
I was so dead set on winning him back after I found him online.
You see, I’m a sucker for happy endings. There’s still a romantic in me that refuses to die, even after all these years, even after loving one man with every part of me, only to be left with nothing. Even after being married to someone who didn’t blink a tear when he walked away, stopping my whole world in one split second.
The losses have been brutal. Wounds that bled out on hardwood floors, I once imagined he’d help clean up. But it was his dagger that brought me to my knees.
The same man who vowed to love me in sickness and in health, for better or worse. He broke those vows. And now, I write about the ways you can kill the person you love, with online lies, with emotional neglect, with silence.
Stay with me as I bury him.
Because the man I loved is gone.
This is an obituary dressed as an article. Set fire with the ashes of my heartbreak, caught in the wind of weeping sorrows. Scheduled to publish on November 29th.
It’s calledLove Me with Lies. And it dances dangerously close to the truth.
I had jumped to the ending before I ever told you the beginning. But maybe that’s the mercy in it. Now you know what’s waiting for you at the other side of this story.
I’m giving you a choice, the one I never had. You can walk away now, save yourself from the grief, the sharp ache of betrayal. From the way dating apps masquerade as hope, only to leave you bleeding.
I couldn’t let go of him, not completely. I should have.
But the message box of Pandora let me stay attached to him
to a love made of lies, a fantasy spun in midnight texts and false promises.
I didn’t even notice Dane standing there until Carrie began reading the first page of my article aloud. I thought the words were in my head, reliving themselves, dancing across the page like an inky storm against a pale grey sky.
Dane held out a few of my lost papers. The wind picked up again, flicking the corners as if they had wings. Strands of my black hair blew across my face, and he reached out, hand open, inviting me to rise.
My heart said:Take it. My head screamed:Don’t you dare. That bitch gives bad directions.
He could become something, Penn,the voice inside me whispered as my knees pressed into the cold, wet grass.
A new memory garden,it said.Clover sprigs. Yellow roses. Forget-me-nots in brilliant blue.
“I’m okay,” I bit out, avoiding his eyes.
But he wasn’t wearing his usual Nikes. He wore brown leather dress shoes. Polished. Dark navy linen trousers instead of grey track pants.
