u/Simp-Lee

A poet’s heart is a strange thing.

It hears the crack in a woman's voice and carries it home like a shard of glass.

It sees an empty chair and leaves room for the body that isn't coming back.

It finds fingerprints beneath the dust on things no one touches anymore.

A photograph fades at the edges. The smile remains. That somehow hurts worse.

A poet walks into an ordinary room and notices the silence sitting where someone used to be.

Love leaves its coat on the back of the door. Months pass. No one comes to claim it.

Loss moves in without knocking. It sleeps beside you. It learns where the floorboards creak.

Longing is a hand still reaching across an empty bed.

And grief—

grief is finding her hair caught in the brush long after there is no one left to brush it.

The heart bleeds.

The poet opens the notebook.

A black river crosses the page.

Something falls from the wound between two words.

The poet keeps writing.

Not because the wound is beautiful.

Because leaving it unwritten would mean carrying all that blood alone.

Will anyone notice the words stopped?

When the ink dries and the pen lies untouched, cold beside the empty page?

Will anyone wonder why the room grew quieter, why the darkness stopped leaving footprints in verse?

I have spent so long scattering pieces of myself between broken sentences— little black bones buried beneath the words.

You called it poetry.

I called it the only way I knew to leave a light on when I couldn't find my way home.

So tell me—

when the last sentence goes unwritten, when my words fall silent, when the page waits and waits and waits—

will anyone notice?

Will anyone look at the empty space where my words used to bleed and wonder where I went?

Or will the silence fit perfectly around me,

as though I was never there at all?

I know what I am—
a house after the fire,
walls still standing
because nobody thought
to tell them they could fall.

There are rooms inside me
I keep locked,
not because they are empty,
but because too much
is still bleeding in them.

So if you can't love me,
I understand.

Your heart has no room
for mine,
I won't ask you to make one.

Just—

don't let me hope
You're already leaving.

Don't put your hand
against these broken places
just to learn where they hurt.

I'm already carrying
more ghosts than I can name,
more scars than I know how to hide.

I can't survive another goodbye
wearing the face
of something I believed in.

So please,
if I am only ever going
to be your almost—

be gentle.

I've had enough
of being the place
where beautiful things
come to die.

I keep looking for someone to blame

when there is no one left to point at.

No villain.

No broken promise.

No door slammed hard enough

to drown out the truth.

Just me.

I am the common thread

through every empty room,

every goodbye,

every hand

that eventually let go.

I am the reason

I sleep alone

with the other half of the bed

cold as a grave.

The reason no one stays.

The reason no one chooses me.

The reason every little hope

eventually learns my name

and leaves.

Maybe I wasn't cursed.

Maybe I was the curse.

Maybe love didn't fail me.

Maybe I was simply

too damaged to hold it

without bleeding all over it.

And that's the part

I cannot forgive myself for—

not that they left,

but that somewhere along the way

I became someone

even I wouldn't choose.

So here I am,

alone with the wreckage,

finally understanding

the cruelest truth of all:

I spent my whole life

searching for the reason

no one could love me,

never realizing

I was standing

in the mirror.