these days, my soul feels heavy,
bursting with a secret still untold.
bearing it, it scorches steady,
but you broke our dream i’d hold.

your cruelty lived in me, raging.
i long craved what you’d denied.
it took an age to stop the blaming —
i, too, had darkness inside.

and yet, to this day, i’d circle back,
turn the bitter wheel of time,
re-play our teenage soundtrack
with a sip or two of wine.

knowing everything, i’d hit rewind,
see where our road leads to,
appreciate you, with a mature mind,
and undo all of your wounds.

maybe we’d stay ‘in the zone’,
maybe we’d claim the world —
wander every corner of our home,
or england’s cold and grim shores.

we wouldn’t be so far away,
pretending, frigid strangers.
i’d know all of life’s mistakes,
all your whispered prayers.

defiant thing, the past.
it offers less than what it stole.
my heart still pulls toward
a time when yours was whole.

i’d know you’re not tormented by
neither the past, nor the present.
i’d know you healed with time,
and wish our sorrow never happened.

but if one day, you still look back,
know, my heart is pure.
as you turn back, breathe for me —
then don’t look back at all.

You told me you were trying.
I told you about the time
I threw up so hard I started praying.
I saw stars in my hair
and thought they might be angels.
But it was just the acid.
Just the light.
Just me, alone again
in a bathroom that never loved me back.

You didn’t say anything,
and that said everything.
You texted “sorry”
like a magician pulling shame from his sleeve,
then disappeared
like a good lie.
I stopped asking you
to prove yourself after that.
I just started watching
to see if you ever would.

Maybe I made the whole thing up.
Maybe you did say something.
Maybe it was kind.
Maybe it was cruel.

Maybe the light flickered
because of bad wiring,
not heaven.
Maybe I was just sick.
Maybe you were just tired.
Maybe none of it meant anything.

But then why
do I still dream in that fluorescent color?
Why does the silence still have your shape?
I built a chapel from our last conversation.
Tried to make the ache holy.
But I was the only one kneeling.
And no one wants a martyr
who won’t shut up.

You said I was unwell.
I said, Amen.
You said I was always bleeding.
I said, Isn’t that what makes it a miracle?
Because if this isn’t a resurrection,
then I’ve been dying for nothing.

I gave you the ugliest parts-
even the bathroom prayers,
even the version of me
that asked God to make you gentler.
You said, “I didn’t ask for that.”
I said, “Exactly.”

You weren’t the end of the world.
You were just the earthquake
I canonized.
The tremor I learned to waltz with.
The reason my mouth still tastes like salt
and I call it grace.

So if God ever comes back,
I’ll know how to greet him:
on my knees,
already emptied.

I told the stars to shut up.
They weren’t witnesses. They were worse.
They kept spelling your name,
blinking slow, like pity,
glinting gallant-
like that ever saved anyone.

I walked past the summer we called ours
like I wasn’t still stalking it.
Like I didn’t prowl on purpose,
like I didn’t rehearse your alibi,
like I didn’t pray
(for prey.)

I was fine with the trees, the oil stains,
the way the sun pretended nothing happened.
I could go days without hearing an ice cream truck,
or seeing a sun-burnt stranger
and thinking: maybe the universe
rerouted you into someone
I could almost survive.

You once said I was dangerous.
And by once I mean
I wrote it down
and heard it forever.
It’s in my lymph nodes,
in the poems you pretend not to read.
It’s in the version of me
you kept almost loving
but never quite chose.

You called us perilous.
Or maybe I did.
It’s hard to tell, since
I’ve been writing you
with your mouth shut
for months.

I keep checking the margins
for your voice.
All I got were
the noises people make
when they’re trying not to drown,
but pretending to wave.

Why is your name still more siren
than sentence?
Still more blood than bruise?
I made your absence
a body I slept beside,
because I kept waking up
guilty.

I never served,
but I wrote the ending.
Put my hand on a Bible,
bit my tongue so hard
the truth still tastes like you.
Wore borrowed pearls,
and swore to God
I never loved you more
than the day you didn’t show up.

I would’ve done time for you.
I would’ve confessed to a crime
that didn’t exist
just to hold your hand once
on the courthouse steps.

You said I was dangerous.
You were right.
But not in the way you thought.
I told the whole truth-
just not out loud.

You didn’t get convicted.
But I still can’t go back
to that summer
without thinking the tan lines
were warning signs,
without getting subpoenaed
by the sky.

Some nights,
your name still tries to get in
like a burglar.
I play dead,
tell the stars to shut up.
But they unlock the window anyway.
They spell you out in light
like they want me to remember
how it felt
to be the crime scene.

The suburb’s still a skeleton
but now I wear its bones.
I was backlit,
bored,
all drywall and divine punishment,
first names shouted through screen doors,
ceiling fans spinning
someone else’s damage.

I kept saying I'd leave.
I kept writing it down,
spending my stories on soft drinks and scar tissue,
but
there’s a difference between
nostalgia and necromancy.
Between naked and naive.
Between full of stars
and just
falling.

We said forever
like it wasn’t
a curse.
Like it wasn’t
already dissolving in the pollen.

I wrote hymns for mouths,
sloppy as mascara in rainlight,
that made meaning feel like a dare:
the emotional oversights
we let ruin us twice.

Flannel soul,
face like unfinished business.
He touched me with all the guilt
of a borrowed god.
Begging,
but never burning clean.

A slippery little eulogy
sprinting toward a dawn already
in someone else’s rearview.
He didn’t kiss me,
but he almost did.
And I’ve been sick about it
ever since.

An ode to night
that chews at the hem
of what we thought we were.

Being here now is
already retroactive.
Already haunted.
Intertwined
like seatbelt bruises.

A small canopied disaster,
still posing.
still pretending.

I was a rooftop girl,
and I meant it.
Which is worse, I think,
than being believed.

The sky never answered,
but I kept
sending poems.

The suburb’s still a skeleton.
I’m just better at burying
what I mistook for light.

I read a book once-
a story so captivating I couldn’t put her down.
Her edges grew tattered, her pages creased.
I etched my name into her front cover
so long ago you can barely see it.
I recite her words to myself even when she isn't near,
My favorite pages covered in notes only in my mind because I'd never ruin her that way,
Her paper so worn,
it’s as if I sharpened a blade that now cuts my fingers,
simply because I refused to stop reading.
I read a book once-
a story so captivating
I couldn’t accept its ending,
so I reread her, again and again,
like my heart could change the ink.

Some mornings still feel like you,
like warmth I didn’t deserve but couldn’t let go.
Memories somewhere behind the silence.
Like a thread I never untangled.

Some nights, I wake up
and it’s like you just left the room.
Like your laugh is still hanging in the air
and my chest forgets it’s empty.
I dream of rooms you still live in.
I don’t see your face
but I wake up full of you,
like love left its light on.

Some silences still hum with what we never said.
And sometimes I still feel the ghost of your hand in mine.

In some timeline,
I said what I meant before it was too late.
I showed up. I stayed.
I fought for you the way you deserved. And you never have to wonder if I still love you.

Some part of me still waits
not here, not now,
but somewhere
our love still lives.

No farewell,no funeral
Just a love that died
Without dying
And a girl still dressed on mourning
For a man who never came.