bleedinginthemidnightdrafts

I would prefer to keep it anonymous, Thanks!

(Inspired by: Pearl Jam: Black)

The canvas of the night is stretched and wide, a dark expanse where old regrets reside. 

I sit in the shadows, watching from afar, as you ignite, a fierce and sudden star.

You burn so bright, a brilliant, blinding white, illuminating someone else’s night. 

I see you catch the wind, 

I see you soar, achieving dreams we whispered of before. 

Your laughter rings across a crowded room, a sudden flower bursting into bloom, and though I’m glad the world has seen your light, A bitter winter chills my bones tonight.

I trace the outlines of what used to be, the faded warmth of your anatomy. 

Now other hands will catch your falling dust, and other hearts will earn your sacred trust.

I know someday you’ll be a shining star, In someone else’s sky, reborn and far. They’ll steer their ship by your celestial sign, 

But oh, my love... 

Why couldn’t it be mine?

The universe expands, and we grow cold, leaving the greatest story never told. 

I wash the ink and blackness from my hands, a lonely ghost in undiscovered lands, still looking up, a captive to the view, forever drowning in the thought of you.

A garden planted in winter soil,

Tended with calloused hands,

Watering dry roots with the expensive tears  of weekly hours on a couch,

Trying to force a broken stem to straighten.

I pull the weeds of my old habits,

Repeating the mantras they gave me,

Yet the petals still drop before they ever fully open.

A perennial disappointment,

Blooming only in thorns.

There is a quiet panic that hums beneath my ribs,

A tight, suffocating panic whispering

That this soil is just permanently ruined,

That no amount of sunlight or careful pruning

Will ever make a whole flower grow here. 

I am a vase held together by superglue,

Always waiting for the slightest tremor to shatter me again.

While everyone else turns into a vibrant meadow.

I remain a single, bruised blossom.

Petals bruised and torn,

Not quite dead,

But never truly alive. 

I try to graft new strength onto old bark,

Binding the fractures with hopeful string, 

Waiting for a spring that never quite arrives in time,

Wondering if I am the garden, or just the fence trying to keep the ruin in. 

Perhaps the soil was never meant to hold a rose, 

Maybe the wild things growing in the dark

Are the only proof i have left that I can survive,

Learning to love the weeds that refuse to die

Written in one of my old high school journals. Apparently after I had re-read ‘Hamlet -Shakespeare’ & ‘Ophelia-Lisa Klein’ (btw I’m a millennial for anyone wondering)

The riverbanks were soft with mud, but colder still was the silence he left behind.

I gave him everything; every unspoken thought, every compliant nod, every fragile piece of a self I was never fully allowed to build.

They told me to guard my heart, as if a heart could be locked away while the only world that mattered stood before me, unraveled and cruel.

I chose his storms over my own footing.

I let his madness rewrite the boundaries of my mind until my own thoughts were no longer mine to keep, drifting like loose leaves upon a dark current.

A daughter’s obedience, a lover’s devotion.

Two heavy stones tied to my ankles. When the songs began to spill from my lips, they were not madness, they were just the sound of a spirit finally breaking under the weight of loving too deeply what was already gone.

The water welcomed me like an old friend.

There was no fight left, only the quiet surrender of a girl who unmade herself entirely just to see if he might notice the empty space she left behind.

Now the willow weeps its trailing hair into the tide, and the flowers I gathered for him float away, scattered and bruised against the gray foam.

I am no longer anyone's daughter, nor any prince's tragic thought, just a handful of cold water and broken stems, finally at rest beneath the surface, where his cruelest words can sink no further.

Take me as I am.

Bare, empty handed, eyes rolled back into a skull that throbs with your ghost.

Look at me…

Shaking so violently from my soul being torn out,

By a hand that didn't just reach, but clawed its way into my belly.

You grabbed, you twisted, you pulled until the tissue snapped,

Dragging out the screaming women I kept tucked behind my ribs,

Leaving nothing but a hollow, bleeding cage.

So please,

Take me as I am.

Raw, unfiltered, weeping, completely malleable in your palms.

Instill the fear of god inside of me

Let it crush what’s left,

Because anything is better than this blinding, white hot agony

That fried my brain and cauterized my blood vessels into ash.

Just take me as I am.

I am yours.

Because I am so, so tired of trying to be my own.

The clock on the wall beats a heavy, lead drum, but the seconds stretch out into years. 

I am trapped in a freeze-frame, paralyzed, numb, 

While my chest fills with saltwater tears.

You move like a ghost through a sun-dappled room, so light, so untethered, so high. 

You are drifting aloft in a quiet, pale bloom, 

While I watch from the floor as you fly.

But you aren't flying. 

You’re floating, a weightless balloon, cut loose from the dirt and the ache. 

And I am the anchor dragged into the dune, suffocating for every breath you won't take.

I am drowning in air, gasping hard for your lungs, as the pressure builds thick in my head. 

The pleas and the prayers taste like ash on our tongues, while you coast on a soft, feather bed.

The water is rising, it’s up to my chin, I am sinking under the weight of your peace. 

I’m fighting the current you’re slumbering in, begging the storm for release.

You look down at me through a glass bottom boat, serene in your slow motion slip. 

You don’t feel the panic, you just casually float, While I swallow the sea for your ship.

“What is your biggest fear?” 

I give the usual lie. Spiders, or heights. Something small, safe, and disposable. A normal answer to fit a normal girl. I bury the real truth in the dark, hoping if I pretend it isn’t there, it might dissolve.

But you want to get closer.

And the closer you get, the more the mask begins to slip. You start to see the monster I try so hard to hide. You start to understand why loving me is a battlefield.

You see how I dissect the quiet spaces between your words, overthinking the sharp, sudden shift in your tone.

You see the humiliation in my eyes when I beg for the reassurance I so desperately need, only to recoil in shame the moment you give it.

You watch me fracture over a last minute change of plans, spiral into a panic you will never fully understand. 

Because to you, it’s just a rescheduled dinner.

To me, it’s the first quiet step of you leaving.

Do you hate me? 

Did I do something wrong? 

Am I finally the burden I always feared I’d be?

That is the cruelest part of this design. Until you knew me, all you saw was the sun. But the second the clouds roll in, the second the mask cracks and the real, terrified me looks out at you...

You do exactly what the others did.

You turn your back, and leave me alone with the monster again.

He loved me. I know he did.

But he hated himself with a violence I was entirely unprepared for, and there is no out loving a graveyard.

No matter how gently I held him, his hands were always digging inward, clawing for the parts of himself he wanted to erase.

I mistook his war for a rescue mission. I thought if I loved him loudly enough that if I pressed my mouth to his scars like they were holy texts, that my warmth could trick him into staying.

I thought if I stood bare handed between him and his ghosts, he would finally choose life.

And in choosing life, he would choose me.

But you cannot throw a lifeline to someone who is actively tying the anchor to their own ankles.

A person drowning in their own reflection doesn't see the shore; they only see the deep.

So he loved me the only way he knew how; in fragments. In breathless apologies and promises spoken from the same mouth he used to tear himself apart.

He would hold me like I was the only solid thing in his universe, and then, without a sound, evaporate into his own darkness. I’ve spent years starving in the space between being adored and being abandoned, wondering how a person could make me feel like a goddess and a ghost in the exact same breath.

Love wasn't the villain here. I saw the tenderness in his eyes when the world finally loosened its grasp, the kind of quiet, aching devotion that ruins you for anyone else.

But love doesn’t get a vote when self destruction runs the trial.

That is the quiet, rotting grief of loving someone who cannot bear the sound of their own name.

They will hand you a flower with one hand while burning the entire forest down with the other.

They will look at your bleeding heart, swear on their life they never meant to hurt you, and they will mean it.

They will mean it with everything they have left.

And yet, their sincerity will not stop you from bleeding out on the floor.

He loved me. I will carry that truth to my grave. But he hated himself more.

And in the end, he let the hatred win, leaving me to mourn a man who was still standing right in front of me.