People say to me:
“I’m so sorry you’re heartbroken.
I hope you heal soon.”

But what they don’t understand is,
I am grateful to have loved so deeply
that even heartbreak
doesn’t taste bitter,
and that even sorrow
has a sweetness to it.

Great loss can only come
from losing something truly great.
So I welcome the weight,
because I know
I once held the rarest,
most exquisite form of love.

I am privileged to have known it,
to have understood
what I was given.

And yes, sometimes it hurts.
But sometimes,
the memory of your smile
lights up the darkest corners of my soul.

I still feel our love
swirling in the quiet spaces between thoughts,
like a steady, unspoken truth.

Sacred love accepts the pain.
It does not twist it
into anger or resentment.

It carries it
as witness
to the heaven
we once lived.

Can you hear my voice
screaming into the void?
Can you feel me loving you
in the silence?
Do you know me
in the blur between seasons,
when time loses meaning,
and memories breathe like now?

I saw you in a way
that I’d know your playlist
in any lifetime,
any universe,
and even in the ones
where you break me,
I’d still press play.
That’s how our souls
speak in the silence.

It hurts in places
I never knew existed.
Like how my fingertips ache,
and a mournful scream
lives in the back of my throat.

There is a black hole
where my heart once lived,
dense and ravenous,
swallowing light,
devouring warmth,
collapsing joy
into nothing.

Some days,
the void feels large enough
to consume me,
completely.

But still,
I wake.
Still,
I breathe.

And somehow,
without noticing,
I’ve grown strong enough
to carry it.
Not because the pain has lessened,
but because it’s changing me.

Sometimes,
the pain wants to cry out
I love you
loud enough
to reach you.

But those words
would fall into a silence
you no longer fill.

I wish I’d said them
a thousand more times
when they still had
somewhere to land.

I wish I could say
I love you
instead of
I loved you.

But if this grief
is just love
with no place to go,
I will ache
in all these new and strange places.
Willingly.

And I will wake up every day,
and breathe, one breath at a time.

Because this pain
is simply love,
wearing a different skin.

I am not a poet.

My words were never made for the masses,
Made to pry emotions from your heart.
Rhyme can sometimes leave me at a loss,
And my inkwell is more often empty than not.

I am not a poet.

I can write only what I know and feel,
Each poem I give a little piece of me.
Every line is just a wisp away from existence.
Each poem might just be the last I write.

I am not a poet.

Yet why do you feel like my muse?
Your eyes remind me of a thousand places,
Like sea glass glinting green in the hush of tide.
Your voice has its command over my pulse.

I am not a poet.

But poetry you are.
How else do I describe this feeling,
If not with flowery words and rhyme.
And yet no words can hold it right.

I am not a poet.

I would be lost if I were.
For if I give a piece of me,
It will always be here in this poem,
With You.

To be a woman is to be objectified.
Through your eyes,
I am never just a soul wearing skin,
I am only skin. A body.
And this body
has been too thin.
Not thin enough.
Beautiful, but only when it gives you what you want.

I’ve been told to change, to squeeze,
to mold myself into your ideal:
perfect skin, perfect shape,
a perfect everything,
forever growing younger instead of older.

But I don’t need your commentary.
I don’t want your opinions.
Because I don’t need you to want me.
I don’t want to be craved,
I want to be earned.

This body is just a vessel.
My soul is what quenches thirst.
It loves, not to ******, but to nurture.
It builds, it softens, it embellishes your light.

Only the emotionally fluent
and the spiritually grounded
may proceed to touch this mind,
or this body.

I am not for everyone.
Nor do I want to be.