Eroding

There’s a war inside me

between begging you to stay

and praying you finally go.

Because loving you became survival,

and surviving you became its own kind of death.

I am still learning how to exist

in a life that never planned to keep me.

Every day feels like gravel against skin,

like I’m tied behind a speeding car

watching pieces of myself scatter across the road.

The wounds close eventually,

but scars are traitors.

They split back open at the slightest touch,

bleeding memories instead of blood.

The pain is manageable in the way drowning is manageable

when you stop fighting the water.

But the agony,

the agony settles into bone,

turns lungs to stone,

makes every breath feel borrowed.

Life keeps moving around me.

People laugh, love, leave, return.

Meanwhile I remain suspended,

motionless in the current,

a rock worn down by rushing water.

Once jagged.

Once whole.

Now reduced grain by grain

into something too small to withstand the river.

I can feel myself fading.

Air thinning.

Hope evaporating from my chest

like smoke through broken ribs.

Emptiness wraps its hands around my throat

with a killer’s patience,

and I whisper for the end

like it might finally answer kindly.

But even death keeps its distance from me.

Everyone else already has.

So I stay here instead.

Half alive, half ghost,

only visible when someone needs something from me.

A temporary shelter.

A convenient voice.

A hand people reach for

without ever asking if mine is shaking too.

And when my own need rises,

when the weight becomes unbearable

and I reach back into the dark for anyone at all,

there is only silence waiting there

to remind me

how alone a person can truly become.