She Wrote

He came across the name of an old lover of his in an article about writers on love. She hadn't been a writer when he loved her, he had been the writer between the two. The title of the book supposedly containing her writings sounded familiar to him. He looked through his books, suspecting he already owned the book, and there it was, innocently surrounded by other books of the same genre. He thought she must be one of many contributing writers, which would explain why he hadn't noticed her name before, but he was surprised to find the book had only a single author, her. The book inflamed him with jealousy for various reasons, starting from the quality of the writing, to questions about when she had written this and whether writing had been a secret she had actively kept from him; had she been writing every time he hadn't known where she was; had she been writing when she had ignored him, when her excuses had not made sense, and finally to the aching realization that the content of the writing completely excluded him: every man she wrote about, deemed worth writing about, he was not one of them.