I thought survival would feel like freedom.
It didn’t.
It felt like exile.

The days after her were made of dust.
I wore grief like second skin—
thin, splitting at the seams,
still stitched with the scent of her.

Nothing hurt the way I expected.
There was no screaming.
No righteous fury.
Just a silence so dense
it made my lungs forget their work.

I wandered myself like a wasteland,
each memory a rusted knife half-buried in the dirt.
I left them there.
I had no hands left for bleeding.

Forgiveness didn't come to me.
I carved it, slow and ugly,
from the carcass of my own self-loathing.
Every apology I ever gave her
I had to first tear from my own mouth.

I stopped blaming her when I realized:
She was just the match.
I was the house already soaked in gasoline.

There were nights I slept beside the crater of myself,
listening for echoes of the man I lost.
Most nights, he didn't answer.
Some nights, he laughed.

I learned to rebuild without blueprints.
No dreams.
No prayers.
Just the stubborn, stupid need
to not die in her wreckage.

And piece by piece,
I learned to recognize my own reflection again—
not as a man redeemed,
but as a man still becoming.