I’m deleting you in fragments
Digits before pictures
Like pulling teeth in the wrong order
The apps still think we’re married
Offering me sales on rings
A carousel of anniversaries I don’t want tickets for
Every playlist is wired with shrapnel
A hook catches my ribs
The bridge splits open under me
Even silence feels like background music I forgot to turn off
Your name surfaces in autofill
A half-built ghost the keyboard won’t let rot
Loss written out for me before I even breathe it
I clear the cache
But the body has no settings menu
Skin remembers fingerprints
Shoulders still flinch at phantom weight
The servers keep everything
So do I
Unopened folders
Permissions denied
A hard drive buzzing at night
With what it refuses to erase

I memorised this house’s percussion
Before I learned to speak
Survival dictated it
My bedroom door doesn’t lock
None of them do
A house of false privacy
Where boundaries exist only in theory
So I learned to barricade myself with silence instead
To make myself so quiet that they forget I’m here
To breathe so softly that the air around me remains undisturbed
I became a ghost in my own home long before I learned to detach
The walls are thin enough that voices carry
But thick enough that words get muffled
Just the tone remains
Sharp
Accusatory
Defensive
Pleading
A symphony of dysfunction in four-part disharmony
I press my ear against the cool plaster sometimes
To feel the vibrations
Anger has a particular frequency
It rattles your molars if you press your jaw to the wall just right
A house full of translators for people standing three feet apart

The sky drips ink
It stains my hands
A silent clock
No time to stand
I drink the tar
It pulls me down
Thick and black
It spins me round
I’m drowning
Drowning inside out
Smoke in my lungs
No way to shout
Echoes
They call
They pull
They bite
I’m lost
I’m lost
In endless night
A mirror cracks
But shows no face
A hollow laugh
It haunts this place
I’m breathing shadows
Thick and slow
A nightmare river where I flow
The stars are wounds
They bleed the dark
A frozen scream
A burning spark
I hold my breath
The silence roars
A thousand whispers
Behind locked doors
My fingers grasp
But touch no skin
A fading world
I’m trapped within

I turned into an alley that had
No right to exist
The walls stretched at impossible
Angles while the graffiti
Writhed like snakes
Letters curling as they worked to Unspell themselves before
Reforming into shapes
That I couldn’t comprehend
Spray-painted faces snarled
Whispered
Laughed
Every corner I passed
Seemed to fold inward
Narrowing
Bending
Guiding me deeper into a labyrinth
That was neither city nor dream
Smoke from a joint
Or maybe the air itself
Curled around me
Forming letters
Warnings I could almost read
Shapes hovered like
Half-formed geometry
The theremin-like wail
From the previous night returned
Sharper
Higher
Twisted into an accusation that
I could feel behind my ribs

I have pasta trauma
That’s the joke I tell
But it isn’t funny
It’s shorthand for the sickness
That never leaves
It’s why hunger feels safer than indulgence
Why I can starve myself with ease
But stumble over a plate of something rich
I am fluent in the language of deprivation
Fullness has always felt like arrogance
Nobody talks about the way shame
Ferments in the stomach
How it sits heavier than food ever could
Shame teaches you to apologize for existing
Before you even open your mouth
Shame teaches you to rehearse obedience
Until it becomes instinct
Hunger became my first addiction
The only sensation I could control
I didn’t know then that choosing not to eat
Was the closest thing to rebellion I had

Bone resembles glass in my chest
Remembering your weight
I folded the light inside my ribs
Until it snapped into a cage
The air is a mirror
And you are not reflected in it
Every corridor I walk hums
With the absence you carved
Trust rotted
Left fingerprints in my veins
I traced them with ice
Fingers frozen into claws
That caught nothing
The soft part of me
Was a city you razed
Now the rubble has its own pulse
And it beats without a sound
I wear the memory of you
Like a shard pressed into skin
And it hurts so precisely
That the wound is elegance
Nothing passes through
Nothing touches
Nothing bends
Even grief is a machine I dismantled
And stacked into neat towers
Inside the hollow of my throat
I do not bleed
I do not wait
I do not hope
Even fear folds into itself
Before it reaches me
Every echo of your voice
Is a fossil
Every warmth you left
Is a blueprint for winter
The world moves around me
And I am a cage that nobody owns
The frost in my lungs
Has learned its own gravity
You left nothing
I built everything from the absence
Ash is stronger than flesh
Silence sharper than a knife
And I will carry it all
Without ever opening the door Again

You were my skin
My bones
My voice
Every crooked part I let you hold
"I'm gone"
Two words
A knife right through
With practiced precision
Do you know how heavy betrayal is
When it smells like trust?
I'm twisted around our memories
A coil of hands and voices
You left dangling midair
I can't breathe
I can't think
You're everywhere
Inside my chest
In my throat
Gnawing
Twisting
I wanted you to stay
I wanted the safe place
I built inside you to be real
I wanted you
I wanted you
I wanted you
I don't want another beginning
I don't want to fold myself
Into someone else's hands
Just to get shredded again
I wanted everything
And it broke me anyway
I hate it
The way I love you
The way I can’t erase you
The way it cost my sanity
While you carry nothing
I don’t want anyone else
I can’t
I won’t
I can’t go through this again
I won’t survive it
You’re gone