You took my heart in your hands,
and broke it,
not with the elegance of plates shattering,
but with the brutality of a butcher’s blade
mincing flesh into pieces too small to count.
I stayed awake for nights,
on the floor of my own mind,
picking through the shards
with bleeding fingers,
trying to fit them back into something
that looked like me.
You were the last person I thought
could make me stutter on the word betrayal.
And yet,
here I am,
choking on it like a mouthful of glass.
Even then,
I smiled when I saw you.
Because for me,
you were home.
But now I know,
even homelands can betray their own people.
Still, I waited.
God, I waited.
For you to come back,
to hold the crying child
that still sobs inside me,
to glue the shards together
and tell me I wasn’t unlovable.
But you didn’t.
You were where you always wanted to be,
far from me.
And I was stranded
in the place I feared most:
nowhere.
A land without maps,
without light,
without a name.
I crept into corners I shouldn’t have,
because there was nowhere else to go.
I begged, Oh i begged,
on knees against rotting ground,
face tilted to an endless seeming sky,
but you never came.
Now, I just stand here,
in the doorway of something closing.
The door refuses to lock,
as if mocking me.
As if saying:
You will always leave it open for them.
And maybe I will.
Maybe that is my curse,
to guard an unlocked door
for someone who never even turns back.
