Born and raised with smiles,
but the sky was always cracked.
Pills shatter in my hand—
fragile ghosts of sleep.
Unreliable… like time slipping sideways.

Scars rise in dreams,
whispering their secrets to the dark.
I’ve got you now—
you, the shadow, the mirror,
stroking my nerves to rest,
to quiet the beast inside.

I remember you as a crush,
when the sun burned softer,
when the roads seemed endless.
Now I hold you,
a treasure,
a puzzle.

Piece by piece, I feel you—
bursting with words,
breaking the silence,
rewriting the dream.

I found a photo today—
its edges frayed,
its silence speaking louder than memory.
The ghost of her,
born of pain but draped in a soft, unknowing light.
How could she not see?
The naïve tilt of her mouth,
the unarmored gaze of someone
who believed in futures made of love.

I would step into that stillness if I could,
shake her shoulders,
tell her to run before the lies
knotted themselves around her ribs,
before his dagger—
not sharp, but slow,
pierced the center of her trust.

I would tell her to proclaim love
where it mattered,
to her daughter watching silently,
to the family she left in the shadows
for a man who swallowed the light.
Every day, her daughter saw it—
the slow dying,
a death stretched across years,
not swift but unrelenting,
like a clock with no hands to stop it.

Run, I’d say,
before the hollow gestures,
before the waiting
for a love that never belonged to you.
See through him,
his promises fragile as dried leaves,
his truths curving away like smoke.

But now I hold the photo,
and she is already gone,
a ghost I can only argue with
in the quiet of my mind,
a ghost who will never hear me.

My beloved,

you who stand beside me in the quiet hours of my despair,

do you not see the burden I carry?

It is not of the body, for the body endures;

it is of the soul,

woven with threads of fear and longing.

You speak to me with the voice of the wind,

soft yet unyielding,

and your words rise like a tide
against the cliffs of my sorrow.

In your calm, I find a mirror to my tempest,

and in your silence, the wisdom I have long sought.

These battles we fight are not waged with swords,

nor are they seen by the eyes of men.

They are the wars of the spirit,

where darkness wrestles with light,

and the heart is both the battlefield and the victor.

Do not pity my scars,

for they are the sigils of my becoming.

Do not fear my tears,

for they water the garden of my resilience.

The future stretches before us like an endless sky,

painted with the colors of our dreams and fears.

And though I have spoken of death,

it is life that calls me forward,

its voice a whisper, a song, a command.

Together we walk, you and I,

not toward an ending,

but toward a beginning of an unknown future.

Beneath the weight of the moment,
fractured seconds linger like echoes,
etched into the hollows of my mind.
Most things dissolve,
consumed by the hungry tides of forgetting,
but not this—
not the way you made me feel.

Small.
Insignificant.
The air stolen from my lungs
as life unraveled, thread by thread.
I lay there,
the world shrinking,
your gaze an avalanche,
your silence a knife.

It wasn’t the darkness that stayed—
it was the sharpness of being
discarded, diminished, erased.

I will not forget.
The universe has ways
of balancing its scales.
And when it does,
may you feel what I felt—
every fragment of it.