I can live with out them.
The words that cut me.
The demons that haunt me.
The boys that couldn't love me.
I am enough.

I can live without the mistakes
they make my chest tight
they make me doubt myself.
The dirt on my hands that never
came clean.
I can cleanse myself.

I can live without distortion.
The twisted world I lived in.
The lies and manipulation
the contorted memories
and pointed fingers.
I can just be whole.

I can move on from my past.
Heal from the pain.
Heal my world of ruin.
Set aside what's been lost.
It's beyond me now.
My future is forward.
I can rebuild.

In the end
what hurt the most
wasn't the confirmation
of how much he hated me.

It wasn't the verbal abuse
the words that linger
and haunt
causing pain all this time after.

It wasn't the emotional abuse
the neglect
or the cold heart
that cut
and left frost bitten scars
on my soul.

It wasn't the mental abuse
of how incompetent
how worthless
I am as a person
or how his voice still rings
in my head
trying to convince me
that I am not worthy of love.

What hurts the most is the hope.
Hope that he will change
Hope that he will heal
Hope that he will see me
for who I am
and not what he's tainted
and twisted
into the memory of.

The hope that
some small part of him
truly did love me
before
he aimed to destroy me.

Old wounds reopen
the pain
suffocating.
The conversation
between us is so small.
How can someone
I keep so close
be so far away?
Lost in physical form
but haunting
In spirit.
He's a ghost
and I'm just
a person
he never really knew.

Only one
intrusive memory
and I break.
Tears push forth
and fall
without permission
or warning.
My heart
begins to beat
with this
incurable ache.

I find him in stillness.
When the world's silent
When I finally find a moment
To stop
And pause everything.

The ache in my chest
Returning
When I stumble
On memories
On music
On the realization
That I miss him.

I beg my heart
Plead reasoning
Denouncing how it feels.
We don't belong together
We can't pull stars from the sky
We can't change fate.
He didn't want me
For better or for worse.
Why after all this time,
Does it still hurt?

I don't want to love him
Anymore...

I have knelt,
Knees to ground
And head bowed
before the fallen.
My decent slow,
And harrowing.
Leaving me
shattered
And no longer whole.  

I have held conviction,
In the faithless.  
Refusing to waiver,
Solidified by belief
In something that could,
And would,
Never be.  

Vigilant and coherent,
I witnessed myself break.
Pieces of me distorted,
Distributed along the floor.
My hands cut on jagged edges,
That I could not,  
And would not,
Be able to piece back together.
I am now,
a mosaic of who I once was.  

My world has ended
On more than one occasion.
Tears creating rivers,
To vast to cross
And so I drowned.
The internal conflict
Of whom I once was,
And who I am now,
coming into vision.
Consuming is the concept
Of whether I should be
proud,
Or ashamed of these things.

I wept an ocean and dared to drown, in the waves of yesterday. I lingered exhausted on its shore, but I knew I couldn't stay.

I walked a path of hardened stone, my boots torn and broken. I sealed my lips of secrets kept, horrors survived yet never spoken.

I held hope in tenacious hands, a flicker of flame that I could see. Pulling myself from darkened past, is this reflection really me?

I've swam so hard and traveled so far, to find this strength within my soul. I reach for a better tomorrow, the scars I bare now make me whole.

Patchwork shards put carefully in place, a mosaic that beats within my chest. Bent but never broken it drums, my feet keeping the rhythm on this quest.