Nothing Holds
It doesn't end
That's the first thing I understand when the shouting stops when the door finally closes and doesn't open again
There is no clean silence
Just the echo of you still rearranging me from the inside like you forgot something and came back for it
I try to stand
I really do
But I don't know what I'm supposed to stand as anymore
You didn't just hurt me you erased the instructions
Every thought I have feels pre-approved by you every feeling comes with a question mark every memory flickers like it's waiting to be corrected
I can't trust anything
Not what happened Not what I felt Not what I know
Especially not what I know
You took certainty and turned it into something dangerous something that gets me punished if I hold onto it too tightly
So now I let everything slip
I don't argue I don't decide I don't even finish my own sentences without second-guessing the ending
It's easier this way
Quieter
Safer
You always said I was too much
Not I am nothing manageable
Nothing sharp enough to cause damage Nothing solid enough to break
Just something that absorbs impact and calls it normal
I hear you in everything
In the way I hesitate before speaking In the way I flinch at harmless tones In the way silence feels like a threat I need to disarm with apologies
You don't have to be here
You built a version of me that keeps you alive without you
And it's working
God, it's working
I catch myself defending you to people who never asked minimizing things I used to cry about rewriting my own pain so it sounds reasonable
So it sounds like love
Because if it wasn't love if it was just damage just control just you taking and taking until there was nothing left
then what does that make me?
What does it say about someone who stayed?
I can't answer that
I can't answer anything
There's a gap where I used to be not empty exactly just…hollowed out like something important was removed carefully so the outside would still look intact
People say I'm doing better
I nod
I've gotten good at that agreeing with whatever sounds like progress whatever makes me easier to understand
But inside
inside is static
Inside is a loop that never resolves
Inside is your voice and my voice and no way to tell which one is real anymore
I don't fight it
I don't have the energy to pull myself back together when I don't know what the finished version is supposed to look like
So I sit with it
The quiet The confusion The absence
I let it settle into me like something permanent
Like this is what's left after love like that
not heartbreak not anger not even grief
just erosion
Just the slow acceptance that whatever I was before you is gone in a way that doesn't come back
And whatever this is now
this careful, hollow thing that breathes and speaks and pretends to be whole
is all I get
Is all there is
Is all that survived
And even that feels like it's slipping
Like if I stay long enough if I stop pretending for even a second
I will finally collapse completely fold inward disappear quietly into the space you left behind
and no one
not even me
Will notice when I'm gone
