I’d spell out the way
you let people love you halfway,
then blamed the empty rooms
on their leaving.

You build doors without hinges,
frames for windows
opening only to emptiness.

You call it safety,
but it feels like a monument to loneliness—
just another way
to keep your hands clean.

You ran
because you were terrified
of what it might mean
to finally be seen—

to stand still long enough
for someone to trace your outline
and call it human.

You thought moving fast enough
might blur the edges,
stretch you thin enough
to disappear—

a shadow so fragile
it couldn’t hold its shape.

It didn’t need to cut deep;
it pressed slow on your softest spot,
and laughed.

And maybe you laughed, too,
because isn’t that easier
than letting someone stay?

Isn’t it safer
to leave the door cracked,
watch them slip away,

than risk them staying long enough
to watch the walls crack,
the beams snap under the weight
of all you’ve hidden?

I poured champagne on the garden,
just to see what wouldn’t grow.
A rebellion disguised as art,
too small to leave a bruise.

The idea felt poetic—
a confession spilled like incense,
settling heavy in the soil,
thicker than regret.

By dusk, the dirt turned sticky,
a graveyard for good intentions,
gold on a barren altar,
pearls drowning in sweetness turned sour.

A bee circled the spill,
its wings trembling,
caught between greed and retreat.

I wanted to tell it, Save yourself.
But even the flowers had given up,
their petals folded like apologies
too late to matter.

I stood barefoot in the dirt,
watching bubbles rise slick
against the roots of something already dying.

At least the garden refused me honestly—
its silence more forgiving
than any answer you gave me.

I laughed at how pathetic it felt—
a toast to nothing,
a promise unraveling,
luxury offered to the lifeless.

I’ll wake up tomorrow
and call it nothing,
but the smell of champagne
will linger on my palms.

And you’ll linger, too,
where regret always does—
settled deep in the soil,
refusing to grow.

We were a storm wrapped in silk,
a wildfire in a library,
a circus of one juggling two.

Whispering
with hollow eyes,
screaming
with sticky mouths,
teeth bared like warnings.

We didn’t love quietly.
We made noise;
we made chaos,

burning so bright
we went blind
and called it fate.

We dipped toes in flames,
called each other liars,
made a scene,
and painted it as art.

We yelled like
the walls had ears,
and maybe they did—

neighbors leaning into the heat
of us, drawn to the firelight
they didn’t know they missed.

Their quiet love folded its hands
on the porch, waiting
for something
loud enough
to break them open.

Maybe they envied
the way we burned,
but I wonder if they stayed
on their porch
because they knew fire
always turns to ash.

Your voice struck the match,
mine poured the gasoline.
We burned to see
who’d scream first.

I yelled because
quiet
would have killed me.

You kissed me like a dare
wrapped in an apology
you’d never say.
I kissed back like I chose
the wrong truth.

You moved like you
were trying
to drown out the sound
of breaking glass,

and I shrieked back
because silence
was a language I refused
to learn.

We roared
like the neighbors would call the cops,
but they never did—
perched on their mezzanine,
our 11 o’clock number
bringing down
the house,
while bringing out our worst.

You tasted like unfinished business,
something sharp enough
to draw blood.
My laugh—
a broken bottle,
teetering on the edge.
And you kept pushing—

a kiss like a scream,
caught in the throat,
a yell that landed soft,
like love was always
meant to bruise.

Isn’t that the way of us?

If I could go back,
I’d kiss you softer, yell louder—

maybe then we’d learn
that loving is different than
screaming,
that flirting with death
isn’t the same as living,
and silk wasn’t meant
to hold storms.

I do miss the noise—
the way it filled the cracks
in the silence,
the mess that made our love
feel alive in all
the wrong ways.

I miss the heat of you
in the middle of it all,
kissing me
hard enough
to steal the breath
I was about to waste
on saying your name.

The stars blinked out one by one,
and for a second, I thought I had won.
You always said I needed too much,
that the world owed me nothing.

But I wanted the debt anyway—
wanted it piled high enough
to scrape the edge of the moon.
I wanted the universe to notice
how I stayed up nights,
bartering my breath for forgiveness
and my spine for love.

I thought the quiet was mine to keep.
I thought I had tamed it—
a wild joy, caged
in the ruins of what we built.

I bartered with silence,
traded my dreams for detours,
hoping to bend the night into something
I could swallow whole—
but it swallowed me first.

The dark wasn’t empty.
It was you—sharp as every breath
I tried to hold, under a sky
too proud to care if I fell beneath it.

And the stars?
They just didn’t want to watch anymore.

This bone-tired body is a battlefield
where I keep returning
to bury the same soldier,
over and over.

His face shifts like seasons—
familiar and foreign,
the line between my lines,
fading into fable,
floating into folklore.

He’s died here a hundred times,
and I survived every one.
But I keep coming back,
thinking I might unearth
something softer.

My hands tremble from holding too much—
soliloquies, symptoms, scapegoats,
saltshakers, semicolons, starry-eyed sighs.
My knees buckle under the weight
of a history I can’t rewrite.

No matter how many poems erupt
from my shell-shock,
how many mornings I crawl from trenches,
listening to the sound of birdsong—
I always return, ***** in hand.

He stares up from the dirt,
his mouth unmoving but full of accusations.
"You never let me go,"
he whispers without sound,
"and I’ll keep rising until you do.
Don’t you get it?
You buried yourself here too."

How many deaths does it take
to make a ghost let go?
I’m running out of shovels,
but never out of wishes.

Some wounds are wars,
and some wars never surrender.
If I stop digging, will the war finally end—
or will it bloom
in the silence I leave behind?

We tangled in tropes,
two archetypes in love with the idea of change,
but never the act itself.

You thought I was the manic pixie dream girl,
a glittering deus ex machina sent to save you
with whimsy and wild eyes,
but I was just tired—
carrying too many rewrites in my pockets,
each one heavier than the last,
all of them missing their endings.

I thought you were the brooding antihero,
mystery wrapped in shadow,
a walking epilogue with smoldering regret,
but you were just scared—
your silence a monologue
no audience could bear to sit through,
your pauses dragging like curtain calls
for plays that never finished.

We wrote each other into scenes
with props we didn’t know how to use,
a wine glass left unbroken,
a door no one ever slammed.
The spotlight flickered between us,
a dim bulb refusing to hold
all the things we wouldn’t say.

When the script fell apart,
we blamed the writer,
the lighting, the set—
anything but the truth:
we were always the ones
tearing pages from the book,
ripping them before the ink had time to dry,
our story left trailing ellipses,
a script still curled on the floor,
waiting for hands that never returned.

I’ve seen your kind of mercy,
and it’s got teeth.
You said you’ve broken stronger women than me.
What a line to throw at someone still standing-
someone still holding your words like a knife
they haven’t decided to drop.

What a way to remind me
that you’ve already decided how this ends—
with me on my knees,
and you walking away,
your hands clean but your mouth ******
from everything you’ve said,
apologized for,
then said again.

I hate that you asked me to tell you
two opposing views I hold.
Did you realize you are one of them?

We laugh like it’s nothing,
like we haven’t spent years
cutting each other open
and calling it something softer.

You still picture it—
me, maybe, or just us in the abstract—
and I still think about how it feels
to be reduced to skin and nothing more.
Like flesh is the only thing between us,
like there isn’t a whole world
I’m dragging behind me
every time I open my mouth
and you close yours.

You ask questions like a knife,
not to open me up
but to see if I’ll flinch.
You talk like the past
is some far-off country
you never visited,
like the scars on me
are postcards from someone else’s story.

But I still feel the weight of it—
your mercy,
your silence,
the words you said twice
just to be sure they cut.

Do you?