Late Night Thoughts

Chelsey (25)

[spellboundsouls]

dead things

When I loved you,

it was with the full violence of my faith.

No restraint.

No exit.

No part of me kept back

for the life

I rebuilt

after you.

I believed that love was holiest

when it cost me something.

So I paid.

With sleep.

With silence.

With the person I had been

before I learned

how quietly

you could ruin me.

I studied you

the way the devout study scripture,

returning to the same wounds

until I could make prophecy

out of pain.

I memorized everything.

The shape your silence took

before the cruelty.

The way your mouth formed apologies

your hands never honoured.

The look in your eyes

when you understood

I would forgive you

for almost anything.

God.

That was the moment

I should have run.

But people like me

do not run.

We kneel.

We call it loyalty.

We call it grace.

We call it love

because no one could bear

to call it worship

when the altar is empty

and every unanswered prayer

was heard.

I made relics

from every moment

you nearly loved me well.

I made a religion

of your almost.

Your maybe.

Your someday.

Your hand at my throat

and your mouth saying

you never meant to hurt me.

I venerated you

the way the religious

venerate their god.

With trembling hands.

With certainty sharpened

into sacrifice.

With the quiet understanding

that worship

has always demanded

something living.

You let me crawl

to my knees

just to see

how long I would stay there.

And God help me,

I stayed.

Before I learned

you can call anything holy

if you are desperate enough

to be saved by it.

But I know better now.

I was not beloved.

I was the offering.

The body on the altar.

The lamb with its throat bared.

The person who believed

if they bled beautifully enough

someone would finally put down

the knife.

But you took.

And I called it love

until there was nothing left in me

that still knew

its own name.

So let this be

the last prayer

I ever make of you.

I loved you wholly.

Completely.

With both hands open

and my throat exposed.

You saw my surrender

and called it

permission.

I am done

making gods

out of people

who only know

how to take.

Done calling the wound

sacred because I learned

how to bleed beautifully.

Done kneeling

at the feet

of someone

who learned the shape

of my devotion

and used it

to know where

to cut.

Let the altar rot.

Let the knife rust.

Let every god

I made of you

starve.

Take your place

among the dead things

I once called sacred.

I will not resurrect you

just to grieve you again.

-CC

[spellboundsouls]

Enough

You keep waking.

Even when the dark hums your name.

Even when the mirror looks back

and feels like someone else’s ghost.

You breathe.

Not because it’s easy—

but because something quiet inside you

still believes in dawn.

The world has not softened,

but your bones still rise with it.

You still make coffee,

still tie your shoes,

still walk through the ache

as if the light owes you nothing,

and you go anyway.

Some days, survival is not brave—

it’s a whisper.

A hand trembling toward the switch.

A single spark in a room that forgot the sun.

But you find it.

Again and again.

And that is enough.

[scorpionlafemme]

[spellboundsouls]

Twin Flame

I was the one who walked away.

I know how it looks—

movement is easier to condemn

than the stillness that starved me.

But you had already gone.

Not dramatically.

Not all at once.

You left the way oxygen leaves a room—

quiet, gradual, undeniable only when I couldn’t breathe.

You stayed in body

and vanished everywhere else.

Your attention thinned.

Your care became conditional.

I learned to ration myself

so you wouldn’t have to.

I began grieving you

while you were still touching me.

That is a specific kind of violence—

to be held by someone

who is already gone.

Every time I reached,

there was a delay.

A pause long enough

for hope to injure itself.

By the time I left,

my nervous system had memorized absence.

My chest braced for it.

My spine learned the shape of waiting.

I did not walk away in anger—

I walked away in collapse.

They call it a twin flame

when leaving feels like amputation,

when staying feels like erasure,

and both options cost blood.

If I abandoned you,

tell me which version of you

was still there to be left.

Because I did not choose solitude.

I chose the ache that had a name

over the one that didn’t.

- CC

[spellboundsouls]

No Statement Forthcoming

I waited a long time

for a sentence that never arrived.

Not remorse—

just recognition.

A pause long enough

to prove I was real

to you.

But silence, I learned,

is also a verdict.

So I stopped rehearsing evidence.

Stopped carrying the archive

of every fracture

like a case file

no one intended to read.

You will never say it.

Not because you don’t remember—

but because remembering

would require you

to change.

I release the fantasy

that truth alone

forces justice.

Healing did not come

with witnesses.

It came quietly,

like returning breath

after years of bracing.

I built a life

that does not need

your agreement.

Your denial

does not invalidate

the injury.

It only clarifies

why my recovery

had to happen

without you.

I am not healed

because you apologized.

I am healed

because I stopped waiting.

-CC

[free-my-mindd]

Forgive yourself

[oldgayjew]

Very wise words ...

[spellboundsouls]

Anticipate

I disclose early.

Not out of trust—

out of procedure.

Here is the damage.

Here is the history.

Here is the reason

you will eventually leave.

If I catalogue the fractures

in advance,

loss becomes predictable—

no sudden drop,

no claim of innocence.

You cannot say

you didn’t know.

Attachment survived by minimization.

Hope is kept proportional.

Grief is accounted for.

When you go,

it will not be abandonment.

It will be confirmation.

-CC

[spellboundsouls]

she was shaped by what never arrived.

by hands that stopped short.

care implied,

never enacted.

asking too much

meant asking at all.

love arrived

as obligation.

something to be earned

through vigilance.

shoulders permanently braced,

softness offered without protection,

the quiet agreement

to make herself smaller

so someone else

could remain whole.

she learned how to disappear politely—

to become indispensable

without being seen.

how to anticipate collapse

and position herself beneath it,

so no one else

would have to feel the impact.

her body remembers everything

the mind tried to justify.

nights spent inventorying failure

like evidence

that would never be submitted.

mornings where breath felt borrowed.

fear settled into muscle

and refused to release.

she gave love as triage.

mistook exhaustion for intimacy.

loyalty for safety.

let herself be depleted

because being needed

felt better

than being replaced.

and then—

she was replaced anyway.

no warning.

no reckoning.

confirmation of what had always

hovered unspoken:

devotion does not protect

the devoted.

some people do not grieve.

they simply move forward,

leaving devastation behind

as evidence of contact.

the leaving did not break her.

it hollowed.

carved space

where certainty once lived.

survival became

indistinguishable

from erasure.

still, she functioned.

that is the cruelest part—

everyone benefited

from her restraint.

she showed up.

followed procedure.

kept other people safe

while privately unraveling.

what remains

is not peace.

it is resolve

forged in grief.

a self rebuilt

from what survived.

someone who knows now

love should not require

self-destruction—

still here,

despite how often

the world

asked her

to vanish

without sound.

-CC

[spellboundsouls]

[spellboundsouls]

Set Down

I don’t remember when I stopped fighting.

Only that one day

I set myself down

and nothing asked me to stay.

Surrender didn’t arrive all at once.

It gathered slowly,

threaded through ordinary moments

until resistance

no longer altered the outcome.

The weight found its place,

adjusted to me.

I wake with the sense

that something essential

has already concluded.

I move through the day

without aiming for anything.

The body remembers its tasks

even when meaning does not.

Whatever once reached outward

eventually withdrew.

This isn’t grief.

Nothing waits to be answered.

This is the quiet that follows

when expectation releases its grip

and nothing arrives in its place.

Untethered.

Unclaimed.

A body intact

with nothing inside it

asking to stay.

-CC

[spellboundsouls]

[spellboundsouls]

Bracing for Impact

I can’t let myself accept love.

My body refuses even the thought of it—

tightens at tenderness, recoils from warmth,

flinches at being seen,

as if love arrives in that same

suspended breath

where the body braces for impact,

where gentleness is only a warning

for what comes after.

Even wanting it feels dangerous now,

a threshold with consequences

my body no longer absorbs.

You taught me how ruin arrives softly.

How destruction learns a quiet voice,

how devotion can empty a person

without ever lifting a hand.

You hollowed me with precision,

left an absence so exact

my body still curves instinctively

around the wound.

Now every hand looks like a threat.

Every kindness feels like the moment

before the ground gives way.

The wreckage in my ribs

holds its shape against each breath—

proof that collapse does not need noise,

or warning,

or mercy.

you dismantled me so gently

I mistook the breaking for my own fault.

My body remembers your disappearance

more vividly than your presence—

the way I held on

long after you had already let go,

offering the softest parts of myself

to hands that never planned to stay.

And though I ache for gentleness

held just out of reach—

for steadiness, for warmth,

for a love that does not demand

I become smaller to survive—

I cannot fall again.

The wound is still open.

The cost too steep.

The risk nothing short of fatal.

Healing is only an outline now—

the shape of what has not yet given way,

fragile as a pulse

beneath fractured bone.

This I know with certainty:

I will not survive

another name written into me

the way yours was.

I will not survive

another undoing disguised as devotion.

I will not survive

another quiet collapse.

I am still learning

how to inhabit the self

who crawled out of the ruins you made.

And until she can stand,

I will move slowly,

carefully—

my survival forged

at a depth meant for my grave,

waiting for the day

my body no longer braces for impact.

— CC

[spellboundsouls]

Mercy

You linger in the corners of my thoughts

like something unfinished—

a relentless loop of recollection

feeding on every quiet moment

I try to claim.

I want one morning untouched by you—

a single waking breath

where your shadow doesn’t fasten itself

to the inside of my ribs,

where I’m not forced to inhabit

the ruins you left behind.

I stripped my home of you.

Emptied shelves, burned letters,

sanctified every room

with the intention of forgetting—

yet you cling like smoke in the walls

of the house you tried to burn,

a stain too stubborn to surrender.

And I blame myself,

not for loving you,

but for offering you the softest parts

of a heart you treated

like a resource to deplete.

You mistook devotion for inevitability—

as though my tenderness existed

solely to cushion your cruelty.

You did not break me with spectacle.

You dismantled me quietly,

methodically,

the way rust claims metal:

slow, unassuming,

irreversible.

I look at my reflection now

and see the aftermath—

a hollowed thing,

a vessel without direction,

wearing the outline

of the person you once claimed to cherish.

I want my life back—

the one I rebuilt from ash

again and again,

the one I forged from brick

and inherited brokenness.

You stole it.

You burned it.

And you stood as a witness

to the wreckage,

unmoved as I suffocated

beneath its collapse.

So hear this:

you no longer get to take up space.

This new version of me

owes you nothing—

not the softness you exploited,

not the silence you demanded,

not the gentleness you held

like a blade to my throat.

You will starve before you taste

that kind of devotion again.

I don’t love you.

I loved the parts of myself

that cared for you so fiercely

they forgot their own pulse.

You mistook my warmth

for permission,

believing you could unmake me

and still be adored.

But even ruins can refuse their architects.

Even embers can outlive the fire.

Somewhere beneath the wreckage

a pulse endures—

quiet, furious, deliberate—

promising that I will rise

from what you left behind,

and that my healing

will be the one thing

you cannot bear.

You won’t be erased.

You don’t deserve the mercy of oblivion.

But I will outgrow you

so completely

that your name will collapse

under the weight of its own insignificance—

and that will be the closest thing

to justice

you will ever know.

-CC

[spellboundsouls]

[spellboundsouls]

[spellboundsouls]

[spellboundsouls]