I don’t know who hurt you,
but I can see the bruise behind your words.
They pulse like warning lights
and I want to understand,
even if you never let me close.

You speak of venom,
but I wonder
is it pain just trying to escape,
clumsy and loud
like a child crying in a language no one taught them?

Maybe I was softened,
not by privilege,
but by hope
the kind that still believes
people are more than the worst things they've done.

You call me a mask,
a hollow, a ruin
but ruins still hold echoes,
don’t they?
A kind of beauty in what's left standing.

If I’ve hurt you,
know it wasn’t my aim.
I never meant to twist anything.
I just wanted to be seen
the way sunlight sees through leaves
not perfectly, but honestly.

You don’t owe me sympathy,
and I won’t ask for your guilt.
But maybe, just maybe
we’re both stumbling
through different kinds of wreckage,
and neither of us knows how to build
without bleeding.