It’s so much easier to like
Them
Isn’t it?

Much more convenient
For you
To walk away from me

And make up

A million

And one

Excuses
Why you need to leave.

Would it really hurt you more
Than me
To tell me in my face that

It’s so much easier to like
Them

Isn’t it?

How do you forgive a ghost?

They speak no words.
They never say sorry.
They can never look you in the eye. 
They never stay long enough to watch how much it hurts.

You disappeared from my life.
Without fixing the chaos you caused.

I write letters I’ll never say.
Say goodbyes no one will ever hear.
Cry tears no one will ever wipe away.

You’re a ghost, but your fingerprints will never leave my skin.
You slammed the door shut, but your name still haunts the room.

How do you forgive someone that was never there?

You vanished before I learned to scream.
Now I only whisper.
Whispering “I forgive you”
Whispering broken promises, shattering before they were ever made.

You were supposed to stay.
You etched promises into my skin then peeled them off when my skin became too hard.
Like a coward.
Like a ghost.
I didn’t get a goodbye.
I didn’t get an explanation.
All I got was a lie.
Perfectly crafted by you.

I trusted you.
“She said she would come back.”
“She told me that I was the only thing that mattered.”
The vicious thoughts echoed in my head, swirling around like the wind in a storm.

I scream into empty spaces, hoping it’ll give me closure.
I cry in lone rooms, hoping someone will comfort me.

How do you forgive someone that never existed?

I searched for you everywhere.
But you're gone.
You left as soon as the opportunity arose.
I know you’ll never come back.

Maybe one day I’ll forget who you were.
But right now, I grieve you like a ghost who never died.

I mourn the person I once knew.
I mourn the memories we shared.
I mourn my love for you.

Because at one point, you were all that mattered.
Until you tore yourself from me.

The silence you left still screams at me.
Filling the air with words you never said.

I rehearsed every word I would say to you.
Every scream.
Every cry.
Every conversation.
I practiced every day.
And yet, they never entered the lonely atmosphere.

You took pieces of me I never knew.
I know that I’ll never get them back.
I search for the missing puzzle pieces in other people.
But they never seem to fit the hole in my heart.
In my soul.
In my identity.

Instead, I replaced them with hope.
Hatred.
Resentment.
Because I gave up on waiting for you.

Maybe you weren’t the ghost.
Maybe I am.
Maybe that’s why no one ever seems to notice.

I hate that no one else sees you.
I hate how you only appear in the mirror.
I hate how you look like me.
I hate how, in the end, it’s just me looking back. 

I wonder if ghosts can forgive too.
Do you miss me?
Do you even still care?
Or am I the one that’s haunting the past?
Am I the one who vanished years ago?
Or maybe, just maybe, am I still holding on to the little hope I have left?
Hoping you’ll come back?

Maybe I don’t forgive you.
Maybe forgiveness isn’t something for the dead.

I love them they’re so cool
But they’ll leave me to play pool
I love you do you love me
Cuz you’ll leave me soon as can be
there my favorite people
Wouldn’t trade yall for the world
Would you trade me
Or just leave me
Left teary
While you say you don’t want me
And I talk unnecessarily
So I shut mouth
Say I didn’t wanna come
You say your glad
You can tell I’m mad
But I still love you
And you still go

He crawled through seven weeks,
her voicemail still unplayed
burned letters on the stovetop,
and brushed the ash away.

The mattress holds her perfume,
her hair still haunts the sheet.
It lingers just to gut him,
then breaks beneath the heat.

"I gave you what I carried,
a key, a ring, a name.
You marked it as a chapter,
the ending never came."

Streetlights blink and stutter,
pulse yellow, white, then blue.
They gnaw beneath the ribcage
and press on every bruise.

He heard her laughter echo
through gutter sweat and smoke;
coins scatter on the concrete,
a rimshot to the joke.

He cut this trail in whiskey
left dents along the floor,
no battle flag, no anthem,
just shrapnel from the war.

Her glance, a flint and trigger,
still burns behind the eyes.
Not love, not even fury,
just silence split with lies.

The bottle knew its ending;
its glitter salts the ground.
No sirens in the alley,
all bodies have been found.

He slips the lock in shadow
and drifts beneath the gray.
The gospel wilts by morning.
He never meant to stay.

rooftops are where you forgot about me.
you were up so high—
you didn't think to look down at my face.
while you were on rooftops,
i was kneeling on the ground,
wondering when you'd return.
but you simply glanced over the precipice,
knowing full well, that
you were never coming back.

Red.
It’s not pretty on me.
Not lipstick.
Not Valentines hearts.
Not cute red sweaters or “you’re so strong compliments.”

My red is the kind that stains.
That sticks.
That screams when I try to whisper.
Red is the colour of being left.
Not once.
But over and over and over.

My mum?
Yeah, my bio mum.
She left like I was a book she stopped
reading halfway through.
But she still sends postcards.
Like that makes it better.
Like writing, “Love, Mum” at the end
wipes away the years that she wasn’t there
to love me at all.

Do you know what it feels like
to get a message from a ghost
trying to pretend she’s still real?

I don’t read them anymore.
I just stare at the handwriting and
feel nothing.
Or maybe too much.
I can’t tell the difference anymore.

Red is the rage I swallow
because screaming makes people
uncomfortable.
Because no one wants to hear
about the kid sent to boarding school at 11
like an inconvenience.
Shipped off.
Silenced.
Discarded.

Dad didn’t even fight.
Just handed me over
to a woman who never saw me as hers
and made sure I knew it.

Red is the silence between us now.
And it’s loud.
So loud it drowns out the sound of me breaking.

But the worst red?
The darkest?

Wasn’t just what they did.
It was what they took.
Two men.
People I trusted.
People who smiled at me like I mattered
before they ruined me.

I said no.
I said stop.
But they didn’t hear me—
because they weren’t listening.
They were taking.

And one of them carved a word
into my skin.
A word I won’t repeat.
Because it’s still there.
Because when I shower, I still trace it.
Like it might come off this time.
It never does.

Red is that word.
That memory.
That version of me
that I don’t know how to bring back.
Sometimes I look in the mirror
and all I see is what they left behind.

I’m still here.
Yeah.
Breathing.
Just barely.

But I think about giving it all up.
More than I say out loud.
More than anyone would guess
by the way I smile in hallways
and laugh when I’m dying inside.

Red is the part of me that wants to vanish.
That writes poems
because if I don’t put it on the page,
I might not survive the weight.

Red is major depression.  
C-PTSD.
It’s waking me up and wondering why.
Why me.
Why still.
Why now.

It’s wanting someone to hold me and mean it.
Wanting my mum to show up
in something more than postage stamps and pretend love.
Wanting my dad to say,
“I was wrong. I should’ve kept you close.”
But knowing they won’t.
Knowing they didn’t.

Red is the truth no one wants to hear.
The pain they skip over in movies.
The girl in the back of the class
with scars on her heart and skin
who’s just trying to get through the day
without breaking apart in front of everyone.

Red is me.
All of me.
Hurting.
But still breathing.
Still here.

Not because I'm strong.
Not because I want to be.
But because even though everything in me says give up,
some tiny voice
buried under the rubble
still whispers:
Wait.