For the boy with the melancholic soul

Honestly, I don’t know what about him made him so special to me. He was just a boy; made of 70% water. That’s all. He was really skinny, his legs looked like little sticks. His teeth looked like shark teeth, and they were turning yellow from the tobacco. He had a little hole at the center of his chin, which made him look quite funny. But I still loved him. His eyelids were drooping and he always looked tired. But to me, he was perfect. He wasn’t very tall, he certainly wasn’t handsome; but he was the most beautiful sight my eyes had ever come across with.

I spent years searching for someone with a melancholic soul, sadness in his eyes, pain in his heart. And this was it, he was the one. I figured, if I could give him my love, I wouldn’t make the pain disappear, but I could ease it. The fact that I could do that for someone, that I could be that significant in someone’s life; The fact that I could bring some light into the life of a person who’s only known the darkness…It meant so much to me. And so I took him in, and gave him a nice, warm bath in my sunlight. And for the first time, he experienced the beauty of warmth.

Soon later, however, I realized that such people are toxic. They carry their pain with them, wherever they go. And it’s contagious.I now walk amongst the people with the melancholic souls, because of him. He absorbed every inch of sunlight within me, and left me pale and cold. We should stop romanticizing people with depression, we should stop romanticizing people and habits that are bad for us. The boy took away my happiness. To quote Rupi Kaur, “Tell them I was the warmest place you knew, and that you turned me cold”.