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I used to think all the pain was theirs—
their fault, their damage, their doing.
They lied, they ran, they struck first.

But when I stood still long enough,
the mirror didn’t show me wounds.
It showed me weapons.
Ones I carried.
Ones I used.

You want to talk venom? Here’s truth:
I know the games—not because I was always the one they were played on,
but because I played them too.
I masked wounds as wisdom,
wielded insight like a scalpel
to dissect others while leaving my own rot untouched.

I knew how to expose pain that wasn’t mine
because I couldn’t yet bear the weight of my own reflection.
I hid behind language that sounded like light
just to keep from being seen in my own darkness.
I took the high road—not out of grace,
but because it let me look down on people
I didn’t yet know how to face eye to eye.

I saw how often I lit little fires
and called them defense.
How I asked for kindness,
then bristled when it arrived—
because I hadn’t yet forgiven myself enough to receive it.

There was a time I wanted so badly to be seen,
yet did everything I could to remain hidden—
even from myself.

But something changes
when you stop performing pain
and start listening to it.
When you stop needing to be innocent
and start needing to be whole.

You want to know what changed me?
It wasn’t kindness from others.
It wasn’t cruelty either.
It was the moment I realized
I was both the fire and the forest—
the one scorched,
and the one who struck the match.

I watched myself lay traps out of fear,
call it protection when it was punishment.
I used “boundaries” as walls,
“truth” as a weapon,
“healing” as a shield to never be touched.

And then, someone offered me gentleness—
real, undeserved, unflinching.
And I flinched.
Because nothing slices deeper
than being loved
when you know you’re still holding knives behind your back.

That’s the venom, isn’t it?
Not the lashing out—
but the way shame makes us architects of deception.
We manipulate, not out of malice,
but because we don’t believe
our raw self is worth being chosen.

I’ve felt the ache of hurting people who tried to love me.
I’ve felt the shame of knowing
I weaponized my wounds
to avoid being known.

But I’ve also felt the mercy
of standing in that truth, unflinching—
of saying,
“Yes. That was me. And I’ve changed.”

So no—
I don’t battle shadows anymore.
I don’t shrink myself for comfort.
And I don’t let others paint me in colors
I no longer wear.

I know where I played villain,
where I became the very poison I condemned.
I own it.
Not to wallow,
not to beg,
but to walk forward
without the need to pretend
I was ever just the victim.

And because I’ve faced my own venom,
I can smell it when it’s disguised as care—
when it comes cloaked in projection,
pointing fingers to avoid its own reckoning.

So let them.
Let them speak.
Let them twist.
Let them call my “no” an attack,
my truth betrayal,
my boundaries cruelty.

Let them name me villain
if it keeps them safe from their own mirror.

But I know who I am now.
I will not dull my awareness
for the comfort of cowards.
I will not keep bleeding
just to prove I’ve healed.

If truth is venom—
then I’m the fangs.
But not for destruction.
Only for defense—
when kindness is mistaken
for consent to be carved open.

I release them.
I release me.

Because peace isn’t just quiet.
It’s when you stop bleeding for people
who never learned how to hold a hand
without pulling a string.
You’re still here—
technically.
Your clothes still hang,
your laugh still echoes when it’s convenient,
your body still moves through the spaces we once called sacred.

But you’re gone.
You left before your footsteps ever did.

And the cruelest part?
You think I don’t see it.

You think I don’t feel the way you vanish
while pretending to be present.
You think my silence means I’m asleep—
when really, I’m the only one awake.

I see the way you pause before saying “I love you,”
like it’s a habit you’re rehearsing,
not a truth you’re living.

I hear the emptiness in your updates,
the way you share everything except the parts
that matter.

I feel the way your body stiffens
when mine reaches for it—
like I’m not the one you want to be held by anymore,
but still the one you expect to hold you up.

You think I don’t see the way your phone lights up
with the glow you used to have for me.

You think I don’t notice
the way you praise someone else’s mind
with the language you once reserved for mine.

But I do.
I see it all.

And I’ve said nothing—
not because I’m weak,
not because I’m unsure,
but because I’ve learned that when someone chooses a mask,
you cannot convince them of the mirror.

I won’t beg you to look at me.
I won’t fight for what should be freely given.

You’re still here—but I’m no longer waiting here.

So take your time.
Play your game.
But when the silence becomes too loud,
when the mirror finds you on its own terms—
remember this:

I never stopped seeing you.
You just stopped being seen.
Rickie Louis 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 Mar 23
She sang for me—sweet, syrupy notes,  
each vow a stone she polished bright.  
I wore that armor, dull and ill-fitted,  
knew its dents by heart: Mercy’s cleft, Doubt’s ridge.  
No sword—just her quiet blame.  

Now she runs, trailing sonnets lit like fuse wire—  
I love you a detonation in my ribs.  
No gloves, her knuckles raw from grafting epithets:  
Coward. Stain. You’re a bruise—not bruised.  
Her guilt blooms fungal in my marrow,  
a rot she calls communion. I call it knot—  
the kind you can’t untie, just carry.  
What truth? Only this:  
love too close becomes the wedge  
that splits the spine of every yes  
into a chorus of not yet, not quite, not.  

Her father’s guilt wore faces of many men:  
liquid ghosts who slurred sermons at the kitchen table,  
their glass bodies sweating rings into the wood.  
He taught her love is a language  
drowned in amber, swallowed to forget.  

Her mother’s spine bent like a question mark—  
a woman who mistook silence for shelter,  
her tenderness a garden left unwatered.  
She inherited roots that clawed upward,  
thirsty for light but choked by the shade  
of allowance, apology, stay.  

Siblings? Laughter fossilized in dust.  
The house kept a hollow where their voices once hummed—  
a hive of ghosts she’d whisper to at night,  
her childhood a museum of closed doors.  

She learned to cradle shame like glass—  
fragile, sharp, and she dropped into my hands,  
her lover, saying hold this as blood pooled between my fingers.  
She turned every stay into a shiv.  
She built galleries of blame, hung with portraits of me  
whose only crime was seeing her too clearly.  

Love was a mask she wore too tight,  
its edges cutting crescents into her cheeks.  
She hid the rot of guilt passed as bread,  
offered communion wine soured to vinegar.  
She hurled stones labeled This is strength, It’s your fault,  
smooth from years of rehearsing blame.  
She left fingerprints rusted on doorknobs,  
sonnets scribbled in ash on the kitchen floor.  

Armor became her gospel; she clasped it  
to guard the hollow. She refused the weight  
of another’s gaze, the risk of being named beloved  
without flinching.  

She feared mirrors. She saw fractured glass,  
a reflection too jagged to hold.  
She broke every yes at the spine,  
splitting it into not yet, not quite, not.  
She hummed stay. What she meant: run.  

What remained: the marrow of almost—  
a hollow where love’s name gnawed its own tail,  
a wound she dressed in hymns of if only,  
a knot she could not untie, only tighten  
until it strangled every hand that reached.  

Then—one day—the glass did not shatter.  
It bent.  

A voice (hers, but deeper) said:  
You are not your acts. You are not your wounds.  
You are the hand that drops the stone,  
and the hand that gathers the shards.  
The match that strikes, and the ashes that remain.
  

She finally saw her galleries of blame—dusty, warped—  
were built from timber she’d stripped from her own ribs.  
The saints and shields were just men, kneeling  
in not their own glass, but hers.  

She unlearned the lie that love is a test she’d fail.  
The rot she’d called communion was hunger  
she’d mistaken for feast. The stones, her guilt,  
her shame, her own deceit. Her goal, to gain  
what didn’t need taken, but given—her criticism, redirected.  

She rebuilt walls, yes—but with doors.  
A labyrinth where love could wander  
without losing itself. Boundaries not to imprison,  
but to say: Here, I am soft. Here, I am steel.  

She returned the stones, now seeds. The ash, now ink.  
Her hands, once sieves, now cupped to hold  
the light leaking through others’ cracks.  

What remained:  
The marrow of almost, now a scaffold—  
not a hollow, but a vessel.  
Guilt, no longer a rot, but a root.  
And every not yet, not quite, not  
softened to soon, almost, now.  

The labyrinth she built to escape them  
is the one she trapped herself in.  
Their ghosts? Hers now. Their rot? Her roots.  

Press your palm to the glass.  
What you’ll see:  
not a saint, not a shield,  
but a child clutching shards  
she swore she’d never drop.  
What you’ll hear:  
not you will ruin, but you can rebuild.  

This is not absolution.  
This is the marrow:  
the rot that fed you,  
the roots that split you,  
the walls that hid you  
are the same hands  
that can dig you out.  

Turn the stones to seeds.  
Let the ghosts become soil.  
Let your voice, fossilized and frail,  
hum the anthem of the pines:  
*Bend. Grow. Begin.
Rickie Louis Mar 21
They love you like a Monet  
blurred lilies at arm’s length,  
a myth of brushstrokes soft as breath.  
But step too close: the cracks erupt,  
ochre teeth, cobalt splits  
a masterpiece undone by its own grit.  

(We do this, don’t we?)  
Turn lovers into porcelain saints,  
then shatter them against the almost  
of what we think we deserve:  
Their hands too rough, their laughter  
a dissonant chord.
  

But when we leave, we leave fingerprints- smears of our rust, flecks of dried blue clinging to their seams. We call it proof they were flawed, not us. Then we sprint toward new horizons, gauzed in gold, another frame to grip, another lie to hold.

But mirrors are merciless curators.  
Our own canvas? A silent riot—  
thick daubs of envy, streaks of not enough,  
the furious red of wants we sand to dust.  
We name it standards, call it taste,  
while our seams split like cheap glue,  
barely binding the mess we refuse to undo.  

The threshold’s a revolving door:  
admire the distant glow, despise the close-up smear.  

Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.  

Until one day you kneel,  
palms pressed to your private fractures,  
and finally see  
the same jagged light leaks  
through everyone.
Rickie Louis Mar 14
You bloom like a wildfire  
all crackling laughter and unfiltered light  
while they clutch their shadows like prayer beads,  
counting each spark as a sin.  

You reach, they recoil:  
a dance of magnets flipped wrong.  
Your hands (open, trembling)  
become grenades in their story.  

They speak in riddles of blame—  
'Your joy is too loud',  
'Your love is a flood',  
'Your silence? A storm.'  

You learn to shrink your sun,  
to whisper in asterisks,  
to love in the shallowest breaths—  
still, they salt the earth where you stand.  

'Too much', they hiss, when you bleed,  
'Too little', when you scar.  
You map their chaos like a tongue  
learning the taste of broken glass.  

In the end, you are both sculptor and stone—  
carving yourself into hollows  
to hold their not-enoughs,  
while they etch their wounds onto your spine.  

Let them crown you villain.  
Let them drown in their own narrative.  
You were never the anchor  
meant to sink with their ship.  

For the villain they made you
Wear their crown of thorns, but know:
every petal they crushed
still hums your name in the dirt.
Let them call you hurricane-
you were born to reshape shores.

Walk, love.  
Even phoenixes must ash  
before they can rise.
Rickie Louis Feb 9
I am not your metaphor. If I must be alone, I will be. I will not debate my worth. I will not drink from poisoned wells. I am the author here. I am not who you fear. I am not who you need. I am the quiet hum beneath the noise. The unbroken code no one else holds. I'm not leaving; I'm walking toward the horizon where my name isn't a rumor. When doubt whispers, "What if they're right?," I'll answer: "Then let them be right. Let them build their paper kingdoms. I will be the wind."
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