you said you didn’t want to lose me.

you said you could “learn to love me again.”

but love shouldn’t need to be relearned,
should it?

i carried those words like a promise
years later i learned that you were already celebrating him.

i wonder how many times
i loved you
while you were already gone.

My therapist says the words I’ve carried
might not fit me after all.

And I don’t know who I am without the illnesses I’ve been certain of.

They were a soft alibi, not to excuse the harm, but to explain it.
a small cushion between me and the truth.

Without them, every bruise I’ve left behind
belongs only to me, and I am terrified that the truth is this:
I was never sick...
I was just cruel.

I know they love me. I love them back.
But inside...there’s a crack, a hollow I can’t name, a hunger that no one fills.

I’m waiting for the fall, the collapse, ready to disappear, but scared to leave you behind.

Even with light, the dark pulls harder
and I wonder if I’ll make it to twenty-five,
or if the missing piece will swallow me whole.

you were my forever once
until you ripped it from my hands
and gave it to someone else

now even joy has your fingerprints on it

i am loved again
by someone who deserves me

but when they say marriage
i hear your voice not theirs

my body remembers
what my mind begs to forget

i want to say yes
without thinking of you

i want to wear white
without feeling like a ghost inside it

how do i love someone new
with a heart you made afraid of love itself

i know you do not deserve this power

but trauma is not about who deserves what
it is about what remains after the fire

you stole my light
when i told you to stop
and you ignored my red light
and kept going
like my body was undiscovered land
and you were a colonizer.
perhaps my asking you to stop
turned you on
made you hungry.
you looked at me with your hungry eyes
like i was fresh meat
for you to take and have for yourself
ignoring my stop signs
cries
screams
because i am nothing more
than an object to you
made for your manipulation and pleasures.