When I said that loving you almost made life worth it,
I wasn’t reaching for poetry,
I was begging for air.
When I said that loving you almost made me forget
how much I hated myself,
it wasn’t romance.
Tt was survival.
Loving you had felt like taking every drop of warmth
I never thought I deserved,
and handing it to someone who knew
how to hold it without letting it shatter.
You didn’t heal me.
Nothing did.
I was still a graveyard of things I couldn’t save,
a body stitched together with ache and half-closed wounds.
But your love, it sat quietly beside me,
never tried to stitch the pieces back together,
just held my trembling hands while I tried to stop the bleeding on my own.
And maybe, once,
it whispered a joke soft enough
that I stayed a little longer,
just to laugh.
I loved you
with the kind of love that bruised from the inside,
the kind that hurt to carry
but hurt worse to put down.
And somehow,
in loving you,
I almost found a reason
to want to love myself too.