grey-yellow ceilings
grey-yellow walls
i feel myself creeping
into your concrete jaws
i see her bones broken from a lover
a waterfall of tubes keeps spilling over
we save what we can
then send her home to discover
the cure kept her living
but she can't afford to recover
secret codes and concrete jaws
we’re suffocating in ivory gauze
i moved today with no one there
to lift the boxes, fold the air,
to laugh when all my books fell through
or kiss me in the doorway blue.
just shirts and dust and tape and light,
the thin, domestic ache of night,
my life in cardboard, split and strewn
and somewhere playing, harvest moon.
and all at once i’m years before,
your hands against a half-packed drawer,
the brush of fingers, back and forth,
the cheap gold sun, the room made warm.
you made the smallest things feel blessed:
the tacos in a paper nest,
the flowers laid beside my keys,
your hand low, circling my grief.
and i—
god help me, i was not yet safe.
i made my ruin your mistake.
i said the kind of words that stain,
that hitch a harness to your pain.
i made it seem my life would end
if you were not my lover, friend.
i placed my pulse into your hands
and called that love.
i understand.
i understand it now too late:
that love is not a hostage state,
not breath held tight in someone’s chest,
not “stay, or i will not exist.”
and this is what undoes me still:
if i had loved you from a soul
that did not ask to be saved too,
i think it might have worked with you.
but knowing cannot call you back
or soften mercy’s cruelest fact:
you left me gently, and that grace
made clearer what i could not replace.
that last phone call.
your faceless voice.
the mercy in your leaving choice.
the way you let me down so clean
i had no villain left to need.
just grief.
just truth.
just dial tone blue.
just me, becoming without you.
and when the dark comes back, i still
remember how your hands could fill
the hollow places, i still mourn;
but ghosts are poor at keeping warm.
so here i am,
alive, at least.
not cured, not chosen, not released.
i did not die.
you did not stay.
and somewhere in this life i’ve grown
a little less afraid alone.
not over you.
not free.
not done.
but breathing
under the same moon.