gRj
At first, I am stone—
all edges and warnings,
a cliff face carved with no and not yet.
But you? You arrive like weather:
soft hands, softer laughter,
a promise of sun after drought.
(And I forget.
I always forget.)
The days stack like kindling.
Your voice becomes the flint.
I burn so slow I don’t notice
the fire until my skin
smells like sacrifice.
Here is where you change:
The jokes grow teeth.
The silences thicken.
Your love, once a lantern,
now a flickering conditional.
I stay too long—
not because I’m weak,
but because I keep digging
for the woman I met
in the ashes of the one you became.
The leaving is never clean.
It is a bone reset without anesthetic,
a name scraped from my ribs.
But I do it.
Again and again,
I do it.
And if my heart is a map
of all the exits I ignored,
at least I finally learn
to walk through them.