I sit and wonder why
Wonder how
I\'ve came to this point
Where humanity no longer is me
Didn\'t know how to cry
Didn\'t know how to laugh
Didn\'t know what was left inside
All was washed away and left it empty
The night where it went down hill
Was the day I lost the will
I wept until the well in me went barren,
until grief cracked its cup against the stone,
until the last small mercy of a tear
slipped down my face and left me there alone.
I cried until my eyes became two ruins,
raw windows with the curtains torn away,
and every hurt I tried so long to swallow
rose like black water, then receded gray.
The storm behind my ribs at last went silent,
not healed just starved of anything to break.
It left a hollow chapel in my body,
an empty choir, a god that would not wake.
I poured my sorrow out upon the floorboards
and watched it spread like ink around my feet,
a darkened map of all we might have been,
then thin to nothing, faithless in retreat.
I scrubbed and scrubbed the evidence of loving,
the fingerprints, the heat, the borrowed light,
until the room forgot your name completely
and even memory would not spend the night.
There was a time love sounded holy in me,
a prayer I wore beneath my breath and skin,
something I knelt to gladly in the dark for,
certain its hands would always draw me in.
Now love is just a word with all its marrow
picked clean and left to whiten in the air,
a door I stand before with both hands bleeding,
knocking and knocking to a house not there.
Trust died the smallest death and yet the cruelest
not with a scream, but with a tender crack,
like glass gone splitting quietly in moonlight,
too fine to gather, too sharp to give back.
I held it once as though it were a lantern,
a living flame too precious to distrust.
Now all it leaves inside my open palms
are silver splinters and a little dust.
You do not know how gently things can ruin,
how softly devastation learns to speak,
how love can lay its head against your shoulder
while secretly unmaking you each week.
I gave you every soft and unarmed part of me,
the hidden child, the unhealed, trembling bone,
the places I had boarded up for years
and only opened because you called them home.
And you
you moved through me like winter through a garden,
not savage, not dramatic, not even loud,
just cold enough to teach each blooming thing
how beautiful it was before it bowed.
Now every tender thing in me is ash gray.
The petals close before the light can start.
I do not break in fire anymore
I break the way frost enters into a heart.
There are nights I touch the scar and call it mercy,
because at least a scar means something sealed.
But some wounds do not close; they just grow quieter,
teaching the ruined body how to kneel.
I used to think the worst of grief was drowning
the choking pull, the helpless, thrashing deep.
I know now worse is when the tide goes out
and leaves you on its desolation, awake, unable to weep.
Because tears were proof there still was something living,
some green thing grief had not yet taken down.
But I have cried until the river failed me.
Now sorrow wears the stillness of a crown.
I am afraid of how empty I have gotten,
how clean the loss has licked my spirit bare,
how even pain, once fierce enough to name you,
now folds its hands and vanishes from there.
The heart does not always shatter like thunder.
Sometimes it hollows slowly into stone.
Sometimes it keeps on beating out of habit,
long after all the reasons have withdrawn.
So here I am a room swept after leaving,
chairs pushed in, the windows latched against spring,
the dust disturbed, the silence standing upright,
the kind of emptiness that does not sing.
No hope lies sleeping under all this clearing.
No small belief survives beneath the grief.
I burned through every prayer that might have held me.
I outlived even my own disbelief.
If you came back now, I would not know you
not because time erased your face from view,
but because the part of me that once made home of you
was buried with the girl who trusted you.
She is gone.
Not beautifully. Not nobly. Not in peace.
She left in fragments no one thought to save,
in dampened pillows, shaking hands,
and all the little daily ways the broken learn to cave.
What remains is something quieter than healing,
something colder than anger, less than grief
a body full of locked and darkened doorways,
a soul evacuated past relief.
And still, some nights, I hear the ghost of longing
move through the walls like wind through vacant frames,
touching the places where I once kept candles,
whispering your love in all its former names.
But even ghosts grow tired of haunted houses.
Even echoes starve when no one answers back.
So the silence settles deeper in my marrow,
a permanent and unrepentant black.
I do not miss you cleanly.
I miss you like a wound misses the weapon,
like a church misses the fire,
like a field misses the animal that ruined it
simply because the ruin once meant life was there.
And that is the cruelest part
not that you left,
not even that you broke me,
but that somewhere in this emptiness
I still remember how it felt to bloom for you.
So I have made a home of desolation.
I wear numbness now the way saints wore light.
I let the silence tuck me in each evening
and teach my faithless heart not to ignite.
The ache has nowhere left to root or flower.
The well is dust. The storm has spent its sky.
I have wept until there was no weeping in me.
I have said goodbye until goodbye ran dry.
And if you ask what love has left behind it,
not song, not flame, not even sweet belief
only this:
a quiet room,
a hollow chest,
an open hand,
and all of it emptied out by grief.
I don\'t remember
the exact moment I stopped believing in myself.
Maybe it was the day I realized
that love could fit inside wandering hands,
that promises could sound so gentle
while quietly becoming chains.
Maybe it was the moment
I understood that I was never being looked at—
only looked through.
I mistook being wanted
for being cherished.
I didn\'t know those were two different things.
I thought if someone held me close enough,
if they whispered enough beautiful words,
if they smiled while saying my name,
it had to mean I mattered.
Instead...
I became a body before I was ever allowed to be a person.
My heart became background noise.
My thoughts became interruptions.
My soul became invisible.
All that ever seemed to matter
was what someone could take from me.
And when they had enough...
they left.
Not because I changed.
Not because I stopped loving.
Not because I wasn\'t trying.
But because they had already taken
everything they came for.
They walked away carrying nothing.
I stayed behind carrying everything.
Now mirrors have become strangers.
I stand in front of my reflection
searching for the girl I used to know,
the one who smiled without questioning why,
the one who believed kindness
would be met with kindness,
the one who thought being loved
meant being safe.
She feels like someone else\'s memory now.
I search my reflection
for something worth saving,
but all I seem to find
are questions stitched into skin.
Was I ever enough?
Was I only ever this?
How did someone else\'s cruelty
become my own voice?
Somewhere along the way,
their words became my thoughts.
Their indifference became my reflection.
Their selfishness became my shame.
Now every compliment feels borrowed.
Every kind word feels temporary.
When someone says I\'m beautiful,
I wonder what they want.
When someone says they care,
I wait for the moment they leave.
When someone says they\'ll stay,
I brace myself for the silence that follows.
I wear disgust
like a coat I never asked for.
Heavy.
Impossible to take off.
Every glance at my reflection
becomes another reason to look away.
I don\'t recognize myself anymore.
Not because my face has changed
but because I can\'t remember
what it feels like
to see myself with kindness.
I hate how easily I blame myself.
I replay every conversation,
every smile,
every moment,
searching for the place where I somehow convinced myself
that if I had been prettier...
quieter...
better...
more...
maybe someone would have stayed.
Maybe someone would\'ve loved me
instead of what they wanted from me.
I tell myself
I must have deserved the silence.
The goodbye without explanation.
The empty space
where respect should have lived.
Some days,
I feel like yesterday\'s newspaper
crumpled,
discarded,
forgotten.
Something that served a purpose
until it didn\'t.
I wish I could believe
there was something inside me worth protecting.
Instead,
I feel hollow.
Like every broken promise,
every hand that held me without caring,
every moment of being treated as though I existed only for someone else\'s convenience,
has carved another empty room inside my chest.
People tell me
I\'ll heal.
They tell me
I\'ll believe in myself again.
I wish believing were that simple.
Right now,
every time I search for something beautiful inside myself,
I find echoes instead.
Echoes of being treated like I was disposable.
Like I was something to borrow.
Something to use.
Something to leave behind
once there was nothing left to take.
And the hardest part
isn\'t that they walked away.
It\'s that somewhere between
loving too deeply
and being left behind,
I walked away from myself too.
But beneath all the shame,
beneath every cruel thought
I\'ve learned to repeat,
there is still the smallest, quietest truth
one I struggle to hear,
but one that refuses to disappear
Being treated like an object
never made me one.
Someone else\'s choice
to take without caring
did not erase my humanity.
The people who failed to see my worth
did not take it with them when they left.
They only left wounds
that convinced me it was gone.
So if I tremble,
aif I flinch,
if I struggle to believe
there is still something beautiful within me,
perhaps that isn\'t because
there is nothing left to love.
Perhaps it\'s because
I\'ve spent so long carrying someone else\'s cruelty
that I\'ve forgotten
how to speak to myself with compassion.
And maybe one day,
I\'ll stand before that mirror again
without apologizing for existing.
Maybe one day,
I\'ll stop measuring my value
by the damage someone else caused.
Because what they threw away
was never garbage.
It was a heart
that deserved to be loved as a person,
and was instead treated
as anything but.