I once read
That if you still love someone
You don’t leave
I guess that’s why I end up here
Every time
Always so desperate
To keep a fire burning
That I’ll set myself alight.

I’m learning the hard way
That it isn’t always right
Love isn’t a vessel
Within which everything else can survive
Sometimes it’s too much
The trauma
The pain
The fight
Sometimes a surrender
Is the only way out alive
And our broken parts were too heavy
For us to ever learn how to fly
I’m sorry that I couldn’t save us
God knows
I tried.

Teeth ripping skin from bone
I tear away at the flesh you dissolved yourself in
Searching for a piece of myself that does not burn
But layer after layer
I find your name
Etched deep into the marrow that makes me.

I swear
I will bathe in acid
And burn these bones right into the ground
If erasing your memory from my body
Means erasing all trace of me.

I do not know how to live this existence.

Sleep evades me
The mind torments,
Replaying all the moments I should never have given to you
All the moments you never deserved.
This self-loathing makes me weary.

How could I have been this careless
Heart not survived such heavy rains
To throw itself recklessly
Into hurricanes
To throw caution to the wind
Despite everything I knew,
Reject all fears and trepidations
For you.

Sleep evades
And the mind torments
With how I let you see so much of me
The walls I reinforced with such conviction
Fell like they were built on sand,
Because I didn't see you coming
Because you seemed like a soft breeze
But the storm isn't any less ferocious
Just because it begins more gently
And you became everything you said you weren't
And everything I feared you'd be.

What happened to the promise last time
That this time
I'd save more me for me.
I hate that I battled this long and hard
To surrender to something
So unworthy.

This swimming against
The tide of my mind
Is exhausting.
Desperately fighting
To remind myself daily
Of the impossibility
Of us.
I can't find what's not in your heart.

I begged you to stay
Pleaded on my knees
Became a person I didn't know
One so heartbreakingly weak.
Still cheap doors shut on me
As I waited on the cold floor
There were long corridors
A mile to the train station
So many associations you had to pass
But there was no looking back.
I faded into darkness
As you fought your way back
To a world so far
You couldn't even see me
Never once had to hear my screaming.

I get shivers down my spine now
When I think about that day
I want to go back and tell that girl
To get up.
Get up
It's not worth it
It's better this way
You won't ever need a man
That wasn't man enough to stay.
But I think that's what's fitting now
In a pitiful kind of way.

Though I'm sure you wouldn't admit
I think you somehow knew
If you didn't leave me at my weakest -
The only moment I wasn't stronger than you -
If you didn't get up
And leave me then
You'd never have been able to.

In the currency of our current world
I have been taught for as long as I can remember
That my value as a woman
Exists only
In how worthy I am deemed by men.

'Remember, no one wants someone that everyone's had'
Was a favourite of my elders.
A line reiterated to me
Since I was old enough
To be made conscious of being sexualised
To be considered one day by men
Disregarding any of my own desires.
Letting me know
My exchange value
Is worth nothing more
Than how much they might want my body
Or by this we mean
How little they may want it
Once they might not have been the first
Or somewhere thereabouts.

I am no one's virginal prize  
No one's to define or demonise.
I am too much ******* woman
To be reduced to such confines
To be fit into a category
Fit for only men to use
To determine what it is I am good for.

I can be the Madonna and the *****,
Whatever I choose
And every bit of brilliance in between.
But make no mistake
Not one bit of our womanhood
Is here for your judgement
Make no mistake
Not one bit of my existence
Is woven into how worthy you find me.

Yet again
I try to make some sense of this
heartache
Spin the rejection into something poetic
Searching for melancholy romance in all the missing.
But it isn't romantic
And there isn't always sense to be found.
Sometimes it's just broken promises
And question marks
And heavy emptiness.
And these useless metaphors aren't enough -
They don't fill.
Sometimes nothing fills
The gaps and empty spaces left
When it all comes crashing down
When people disappoint
And people always disappoint.
These words don't know how to soothe
The anger I feel
At them
And at myself.
Sometimes there's nothing you can say
Or write
When your body aches with longing
And your mind tortures you
With all the wishing
For it to have been another way.
These pretty words
And this glorified hurt  
Don't make it any of it less true
I think I've always fought accepting
The tragedies I can't undo.