How does this pain still torment me?
It sits in the hollow of my ribs, a quiet tide that refuses to recede.
I cannot fathom it, this ache that lingers while the world spins on, indifferent.
Sometimes I stare at the ceiling and wonder why it is still here, why it clings like a second skin.
I am healing, they say.
The stitches are there, the scar tissue is pink, but the sting is still fresh, raw.
With pain like this I would rather feel nothing, a numbness so total it could swallow the echo of my own name.
The memories move too slow, each one a film reel dragging through molasses.
I wish I could press delete, to erase the frames where you turned away, where your eyes found a different horizon, and yet I replay them, over and over, because I am the keeper of the secret.
God, it’s crushing me most days, an invisible weight pressing down on my chest, flattening the breath that once rose in laughter.
I want to stop this emotional pain, to untie the knot that ties my heart to yours, to loosen the rope that keeps me tethered to the lie of “we’re okay.”
You cried; you sobbed until the night seemed to bleed.
I thought I was supposed to be the shattered one, the one who would crumble under your betrayal.
Instead, I become the one who steadies your shoulders, who whispers “It’s okay” while the glass inside my own chest shatters silently.
I wear a smile, paint it on like the perfect wife, a mask of porcelain that never cracks.
I turn the lights low, set the table with candles that flicker like the hope I once had, and I pretend the taste of your coffee is sweet, not bitter with the aftertaste of deceit.
No one knows. I cannot tell anyone.
The secret lives in the spaces between my words, in the pauses that stretch across the room, in the way my hands tremble when they brush against the wedding band I still wear.
I am a garden of wilted roses, petals falling in a rhythm only I can hear.
The wind carries the scent of what we were, but it also carries the scent of what I am becoming—resilient, reluctant, relentless.
I’m learning that healing does not mean the absence of hurt; it means learning to walk through the storm with the rain on my skin, feeling every drop, yet refusing to let it drown me.
And so I stand here, voice trembling, heart exposed,
speaking to the empty room, to the ghost of the love that once felt like fire, now feeling like ash.
I am both the shattered glass and the light that reflects from its shards.
I will not let the pain define me, but I will not pretend it never existed.
I am the whisper behind the curtain, the sigh that refuses to be silenced.
And maybe, someday, the curtain will lift, and I will see the sunrise without the shadow of your betrayal, just me, whole, finally free.