He wore solitude
like a jacket two sizes too big—
insisting it fit,
insisting he needed the cold.
Lonely, but not reaching.
Hurt, but calling it freedom.
He said he preferred the quiet,
though the quiet kept echoing names
he refused to answer.
His trauma sat beside him
like an untrained dog—
never leashed, never healed,
growling at anything that tried to come close.
So he learned to leave first.
He learned to call it choice.
I found him wandering in circles,
mistaking motion for escape,
chasing horizons that never asked him to arrive.
Every step was distance,
every distance felt safer than staying.
I tried not to chase—
but caring has a gravity of its own.
I watched him disappear
into the comfort of his own absence,
convinced that being alone
hurt less than being known.
And maybe that was true, once.
Maybe loneliness felt familiar,
and love felt like a language
he was punished for speaking.
So he wandered.
Not because he wanted emptiness—
but because emptiness
never demanded his truth.
And I learned this:
some people aren’t lost.
They are hiding.
And some wounds don’t bleed—
they walk.
Jan 4
Jan 4, 2026 at 3:01 PM UTC
Content Warning:
Domestic violence, ****** assault, emotional abuse.
Author’s Note:
This poem is written from the perspective of survival, not shock. It reflects lived experience and the long arc of leaving—how harm accumulates quietly, and how choosing oneself can be both devastating and liberating. Reader discretion advised.
I loved you longer
than it was safe.
I loved you through rooms
where loneliness lived between us,
through pregnancies where my body carried life
and my name disappeared,
through nights I became caretaker
instead of partner,
through days I learned how to shrink
so your moods wouldn’t shatter the house.
I loved you
when loving you meant leaving myself
behind in quiet pieces.
I believed you.
When you cried.
When you apologized.
When you said I was everything.
When you promised clarity
after the fog you kept me in.
I believed you
because not believing
would have meant admitting
I built a life
on something hollow
and called it home.
You called me pure.
Beautiful.
Full of light.
Then treated me like something
temporary—
valuable only when silent,
acceptable only when emptied,
too much when I needed you,
never enough when you needed escape.
I carried the house.
The children.
Your emotions.
Your addictions.
Your shame.
And you resented me
for wanting anything back.
You betrayed me while I was pregnant.
Measured my motherhood
against someone barely grown.
Confessed love for another
while I kept our family breathing.
You let others into our marriage
and told me my pain
was the problem.
Withheld intimacy,
then punished me for wanting closeness.
You broke things.
You drank into rage
and absence.
You scared our children.
You scared me.
And still—
I tried.
I tried patience.
I tried gentleness.
I tried understanding your wounds
as if mine did not count.
I tried loving you
into safety.
The night you pushed me
while I held our baby
fractured something in me—
not loudly,
but permanently.
I remember the floor.
The crying.
The moment I realized
I was alone
with the responsibility
of survival.
You wanted it buried.
You wanted me silent.
Then came the thing
you never named.
I will.
****
I was frozen.
Trying to survive you.
You took what was not offered.
Afterward,
I still made room for your collapse,
still disappeared
so you wouldn’t fall apart.
When I finally asked you to leave,
you laughed.
That laugh told me
everything.
I grieve you—
not who you were,
but who I believed you could be.
I grieve the tenderness in crumbs,
the almost-love,
the family I held alone.
But I do not grieve the fear.
I do not grieve disappearing.
I do not grieve carrying your shame
inside my body.
I was never too much.
You were too unsafe.
I was not hard to love.
You refused the labor
love requires.
I am done making room
for your violence in my body,
your chaos in my nervous system,
your lies in my memory.
I choose myself.
I choose my children.
I choose a future
where love does not hurt like this.
This is goodbye—
not because I stopped loving you,
but because I finally
learned how to love me.
Jan 3
Jan 3, 2026 at 4:14 PM UTC
I weave my stars with patient hands,
spinning silver from silence,
braiding night into something holy.
Each star remembers me—
how I bent, how I endured,
how I learned the language of light
without ever being taught.
They rise in slow procession,
lanterns for the parts of me
that once wandered lost.
Some burn soft as lullabies,
others blaze like crowns,
all of them loyal
to the sky I claimed as my own.
I am not made of ashes,
as they once believed—
I am made of constellations,
and the dark
has never been able
to keep them.
Jan 3
Jan 3, 2026 at 8:05 AM UTC