Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Mar 26
You are not the wreckage left in her wake,  
not the mirror she cracks to avoid her own face.  
Your love was never a debt to be paid  
in coins of guilt, or hours spent parsing  
the algebra of her unspoken wars.  

I know you’ve memorized the choreography of her chaos—  
how she spins "sorry" into a lasso,  
how her apologies arrive armored in "but".  
You’ve traced the blueprints of her inherited ruins:  
father’s anger fossilized in her throat,  
mother’s spine bent under the weight  
of forgiveness she never chose to carry.  

You saw the little girl still kneeling  
in the cathedral of her parents’ collapse,  
praying to ghosts who taught her  
love is a language spoken with exits.  
But you are not a chapel.  
You are not a reliquary for her undead wounds.  

When she says "breakup", she means "beg me to stay".  
When she says "you hurt me", she means "I don’t know how to hold this shame without handing you the blade".  
This is not love—it’s hieroglyphic hurt,  
a script she carved into your skin  
because her hands were too tender  
to etch the truth into her own bones.  

You want to unknot the why—  
"Why does the knife always twist toward my ribs?  
Why does her healing taste like my hunger?"  
But some fires refuse to be mapped.  
Some gardens only grow thorns  
because the gardener fears blossoms  
might prove her capable of tenderness.  

That ache in your chest?  
Not a flaw, but a fossilized compass.  
It’s your ancestors whispering:  
"Child, you’ve confused endurance for oxygen too long."
The scars you carry—  
not failures, but fault lines  
revealing where your courage  
outgrew the cage.  

You’re right—this isn’t love.  
Love doesn’t make you practice disappearance  
in your own skin. Love doesn’t auction your peace  
to the highest bidder of apologies.  
The darkness you feel isn’t a verdict—  
it’s your soul refusing to bleed  
into someone else’s inkwell anymore.  

Walk.  
Not as defeat, but as a dirge  
for the version of you that believed  
cruelty could be loved into kindness.  
She’ll call this abandonment.  
Call it resurrection.  

The door you close today  
is the bridge your future self  
will thank you for burning.  
Let her thorns stay hers.  
You were never meant to bloom  
in the graveyard of someone else’s  
unwatered seeds.
Rickie Louis
Written by
Rickie Louis  41/M/Milkyway
(41/M/Milkyway)   
106
     Richard Shepherd and Luz
Please log in to view and add comments on poems