a triptych in ruin, reckoning, and return
I. The Pathology: I Knew It Would Burn
I wasn’t fooled.
Don’t you dare think I was.
I saw the warning signs in neon,
flickering like a ******* motel vacancy light.
And I checked in anyway.
The first night we met,
I tasted the voltage on her tongue.
She was a live wire wrapped in silk,
a hand grenade with a pulse.
I knew her pathology before I knew her name.
And when her ex called—
the good man, the one who tried to warn me—
I listened.
I heard everything.
And then I turned the volume down,
lit a candle, and said
“Let me try loving her differently.”
She love-bombed like a war criminal.
Doted like a spider weaves silk.
Told me I was everything
until I couldn’t remember what “nothing” felt like.
But I signed the contract in blood.
I wanted the devotion,
even if it came from a burning church.
I wanted to be chosen,
even if the crown was made of barbed wire.
There was a beauty to the ruin.
A heat.
Not the warmth of comfort—but the fever of infection.
She did not take me.
I offered.
Piece by piece,
like petals to a pyre.
Not for her approval—
but for the beauty of the burning.
Her touch was never tender.
But it lingered.
Like perfume on skin
long after the body has left the bed.
And I let it linger.
There were nights
her name sat in my mouth like a foreign prayer—
something I didn’t believe in
but whispered anyway,
just to feel it echo.
She was all cliff-edge and velvet.
All pulse and warning.
And I was the fool who mistook vertigo for flight.
What I loved was never her.
It was the losing.
The falling.
The moment just before the break
where everything was possible,
and none of it was mine.
Even now,
when I exhale too sharply,
I swear I can still taste
the ash of her vows.
II. The Penance: Surviving Myself
I did not crawl from a wreck.
I drifted from a husk—
a ship split open on an invisible reef.
The salt never left my mouth.
I wore it like a relic,
like the tongue of an ancestor who forgot how to pray.
The sky was a torn sail above me.
The days, barnacled and dragging.
The nights, stitched with the faint cries of animals
who had long since turned to bone.
There was no triumph in this exodus.
Only the dull ceremony of walking:
foot after foot across a landscape
stitched from broken compasses and cracked ribs.
Sometimes I mistook the ruins for myself.
Laid my head against the stones and called them home.
Listened for heartbeat in hollowed things.
Forgiveness wasn’t offered.
It was harvested—
thorn by thorn,
from fields salted by my own hands.
She was never the architect.
She was the wind that found the cracks.
I was the tower already leaning,
the bells already rusted silent.
In my quieter hours,
I built altars out of what remained—
splinter, ash, a few stubborn stars
refusing to fall.
There are still nights
I dream of being swallowed whole.
There are still mornings
where my breath smells of shipwrecks.
But there is something now—
something that does not beg or howl or vanish.
A new silence,
dense and gold-veined,
growing in the hollows she left behind.
Interlude— In the Hollow Between
No one told me
the silence would be so loud.
That after the storm
there would be no sun,
only fog thick as milk
curling through my lungs.
I did not beg for light.
I did not curse the dark.
I simply sat—
hands open,
palms salted with memory.
There was a moth once
that lived in my chest.
Fed on echo,
slept in shame.
I haven’t felt it in days.
I think I may be alone now.
And for the first time—
that does not terrify me.
III. The Passage: From Fire to Form
I did not rise.
I unburied.
Fingernail by fingernail,
from beneath the collapsed arches of who I thought I was.
There was no anthem.
Only the slow recognition
that the sky still ached for me,
even after I forgot how to look up.
And there—
in the first true clearing,
where the ashes no longer smoked but simply were—
stood a figure.
Not a savior.
Not a siren.
Not a cure.
A mirror, carried in human hands.
A lighthouse, burning not with rescue, but with recognition.
She did not find me.
I found myself,
and there she was—
already waiting.
Not as prize,
but as witness.
Not to my ruin,
but to the slow architecture
of something holy rising from it.
She touched my hand, once.
Lightly.
And the earth did not tremble.
I did not fall.
Instead, the bones beneath my skin hummed
with the strange, quiet music
of being known—and still free.
I realized then:
I had not been climbing out of the past to reach her.
I had been climbing to reach myself.
She simply stood at the gates,
smiling like someone who had seen the stars rebuild themselves before.