Love everything, hate everything

People admire poets.

I don't.

They speak of poets as if they are prophets, as if they alone can bend language until it bows at their feet, as if words were born to obey them.

But language is older than every mouth that has ever spoken it.

We did not create it.

We merely found ourselves trapped inside it.

It does not belong to us.

It tolerates us.

It watches us reach for meanings that disappear the moment we think we've caught them.

A poet never masters language.

A poet is simply another prisoner who learns how to sing from inside the cage.

Yet poets possess one unforgivable gift.

They sell dreams.

They perfume grief until people call it beauty.

They dress despair in silk and teach broken hearts to kiss the blade that wounded them.

They convince the dying that sunsets are enough.

They make loneliness sound holy.

They make suffering beautiful enough to survive another day.

And so do I.

Oh Mon dieu, so do I.

I hate that I know exactly which words will make a stranger remember someone they've spent years trying to forget.

I hate that I know how to turn pain into something people want to read twice.

I hate that my hands have learned to decorate wounds instead of closing them.

Perhaps that is all poetry has ever been—

a beautiful lie that tells the truth too slowly.

Then there are writers.

They are crueler creatures.

They do not paint over the fracture.

They widen it.

They do not cradle the truth.

They throw it at your face and wait for the sound of it breaking your teeth.

A writer has no interest in mercy.

Only honesty.

Only the naked skeleton beneath every beautiful thing.

And I hate them for it.

Because they never allow anyone to hide.

Least of all themselves.

And I am one.

A poet.

A writer.

One hand writes dreams.

The other performs autopsies on them.

One tells you that stars exist to guide you home.

The other reminds you that stars are already dead before their light reaches your eyes.

And somehow they both belong to me.

What a cruel inheritance.

I love this gift with every part of me that is still capable of wonder.

I hate it with every part that has survived it.

People think writing is expression.

It isn't.

It is excavation.

Every page demands another piece of flesh.

Another confession.

Another secret buried alive beneath elegant sentences.

People applaud the finished poem.

They never notice the corpse beneath it.

Every word I write steals something I can never become again.

Every sentence removes another mask until I can no longer remember whether there was ever a face beneath them.

I cannot look into mirrors anymore.

Not because I fear what I will see—

but because I fear the mirror will hesitate before answering.

I stand before my reflection like a stranger waiting outside someone else's house.

Sometimes it blinks too late.

Sometimes it smiles when I don't.

Sometimes I wonder if the reflection has become the author, and I am only the draft.

People ask me who I am.

I have written thousands of pages trying to answer that question.

Every one of them contradicted the last.

Perhaps identity is nothing more than a story we keep rewriting because the previous ending hurt too much.

Perhaps I have edited myself so many times that the original manuscript no longer exists.

There is no version of me untouched by words.

No silence left that still belongs to me.

I have become a language trying to remember the human who first spoke it.

And maybe that is why I despise both the poet and the writer within me.

The poet keeps teaching me how beautiful ruin can look.

The writer keeps reminding me that ruin is still ruin.

One seduces me into dreaming.

The other wakes me by setting the dream on fire.

Neither lets me rest.

Neither lets me leave.

So I remain here—

half confession,

half performance,

a cathedral built from unfinished sentences,

a ghost haunting the alphabet that created it.

I do not know whether I love myself.

I do not know whether I hate myself.

I only know that every time I write, I disappear a little more—

and every time someone says they found themselves in my words,

I lose another piece of the person who wrote them.