Fracture Patterns

I am living in the house where the floorboards are made of glass,
watching the cracks spread like spiderwebs beneath my feet.
I stayed, a phantom in my own hallway,
clinging to the ghost of a loyalty that you dissolved
the moment you walked through a door I never wanted opened.

I carry the weight of a silent, heavy regret,
a stone pulled from the bottom of a murky, stagnant lake.
It sits in my throat, a cold pebble of realization:
that I begged for crumbs of kindness while you were feast-building
in the shadows of another’s silhouette.

You took the sharp, jagged edges of your character—
those selfish habits I smoothed over with the palms of my hands,
those warnings I swallowed like bitter medicine,
and you polished them into a weapon,
turning your gaze away from the person who promised you everything.

I see it now, the surreal geometry of your circle:
the friends who share your hunger, the abusers who mirror your coldness.
I was a blind traveler walking through a gallery of mirrors,
never understanding that the reflection I loathed
was the one standing right beside me, holding your hand.

Oh, if only my pulse had been faint,
if only my heart had been a shallow, desert stream
instead of an ocean that refuses to recede.
The love was too deep, and now the drowning,
the slow, quiet drowning,
is the only truth I have left to breathe.