When I think about love, your face is no longer staring back, telling me I don’t deserve it. But for the last 5 years, it did. You were the phantom behind every gentle hand, the venom in every soft word that tried to reach me. You carved your name into the foundation of my self-worth and called it truth. I couldn’t look at kindness without hearing your voice - low, close, cruel. You’ll fuck her up too. You’ll ruin her like you ruined me. And I believed you. God, I believed you. I flinched from tenderness, recoiled from hope, thinking I was protecting them from me.
You turned love into a loaded gun I wasn’t fit to hold. I became terrified of myself. I saw my care as contagion, my presence as poison. I loved like I was holding a bomb and the only mercy I could offer was distance. I walked on eggshells made of glass, afraid one wrong step would shatter everything. I carried a storm inside me, relentless and wild, afraid it would drown the ones I loved. My heart became a locked vault, filled with secrets too dangerous to share. I wore chains forged from doubt, each link heavier than the last. And in the silence between us, I became a ghost haunting my own skin, unseen and afraid to be found.
You made me think that love was earned through pain. That intimacy meant sacrifice. That to be chosen, I had to first bleed, bend, shrink. You starved me, then mocked my hunger. I learned to apologize for existing, to downplay my needs, to confuse survival with connection. I called your emotional violence complicated. I called my trauma loyalty. I called being discarded my fault. I wore your neglect like a second skin, stitched from silence and splinters. I danced on shattered glass and called it devotion. I watered your absence with my own tears and called it growth. I lit myself on fire just to keep your shadows warm. I sliced apologies into my wrists like prayers, hoping pain would make me holy. I kept your ghost fed with pieces of my joy. I built shrines in the wreckage and worshipped the ache you left behind. I made homes in hollow places. I taught myself to smile with a mouth full of broken things. I swallowed my voice just to make space for your echo.
But something in me cracked, and then something bloomed inside the fracture.
Now, love is not a battlefield. It is not chaos. It is not your hands, or your silence, or your rage. It does not watch me fall apart and walk away. It does not use my vulnerability as proof of weakness. It does not echo with your voice. It is presence. It is stillness. It is someone staying when I can’t hide the mess. Someone who doesn’t flinch at the trembling, the breaking, the rawness. Someone not afraid of the wreckage, not there to fix it or sweep it away, just willing to sit inside it with me; bare, breathing, unwavering.
When I think about love now, your ghost still tries to speak, but I do not listen. I let it wail. I let it rot in the corner it was banished to. I have rebuilt the definition, from ashes and memory and the brutal beauty of starting again. I have rewritten the script in the language of my own survival. I have purged my soul of you; slowly, painfully, piece by jagged piece. I have clawed back every part of me you tried to unwrite.
Love is no longer a haunting. It is a return. A reclamation. A sacred reckoning. A soft, unshakable thing that reminds me: I was never the ruin. I was just the one left holding it.
The one who stayed after the collapse. The one who dared to believe there could be more. The one who gathered the fragments of shattered dreams and stitched them with trembling hands into something whole. The one who refused to let the darkness define me, who carried hope like a flickering flame against the endless night. I am the survivor of silence, the bearer of wounds that speak of strength, the keeper of a love that refuses to break. I am free of your ghost, but I am still terrified of love. Terrified because love asks me to unravel the fragile, splintered pieces I’ve hidden beneath layers of silence and scars. It feels like stepping onto thin ice over an endless abyss, uncertain if I’ll drown in vulnerability or find the strength to rise. Yet, even shattered and trembling, I ache to try again.