text: "Why are you here?" She asked wearily. I thought I had come prepared to answer this, I knew I did but when she did actually ask me, I was lost for words. It wasn’t so much the nature of the question or the lack of an answer on my part. It was her. She looked so sad, her eyes void of hope and her voice fatigued. I felt responsible, I had taken this beautiful woman, the love of my life, and broken her piece by piece till she became a shadow of the person I fell in love with. When you fall in love, you never intend to hurt the person you care so much about. You would rather die than see them in any sort of pain. All you want to do is spend every waking second with them. I wanted to be her everything and she was everything I wanted. I never wanted to imagine a world without her. Slowly, but surely the magic wears off. Words and expressions become routine. You become comfortable and begin to take her for granted. The playful quarrels become hour-long screaming matches. Sometimes my actions became louder than my words. You can only take so much and I should’ve done better. I thought I was better than that. I resented who I had become and what I had done, but I always had hope. I just wanted her to forgive me, I wanted us to be us again. I wanted to make her happy and carry on like nothing had come in between us. She prompted me again, “Why are you here?” I saw her eyes tear up, every terrible decision I made or thing I said to her exploded through my head. That’s when I asked myself, what was I doing here? The hardest part of knowing that it was over between us was that no matter what I did, I could never make her feel like she did before. I was only causing her pain and this was a hard truth for me to swallow. I turned around to leave knowing that I would never see her again. I mustered the only three words I saw fit, “I am sorry.” Her face expressed more than her words ever would.