To me

So that my spirit could be

Broken

My soul

Destroyed

So I would learn how to

Rise

From the ashes with grace and

It is in me / my mothers blood

Which never learnt

J saw through the walls and right into you. Pointed out your quirks. Noticed. Reminded you that you were enough. Soothed from afar. You want to know more.

The one next to you writes your name with a double 'B', as if to emphasise you, prolong your presence. Points out the bruises on your thighs. "I don't know where they came from" you lie. We both know it's over before it begins. You will abandon him just like he predicts.

*

Forgive me. Having you became unbearable. I learn to finally love me in the space you left behind.

Alternatively, I begin filling the emptiness with thick shadows of hollow men / until I drown. There's not enough soap or water to wash their dirt out of my bones.

*

*

Cultivating light.

Excavating myself from the mass graveyard of your heart. Let the rest of your lovers lie there and burn. I am not them. I set fire to our bedsheets. I shred every last photograph of you and threw it out to the wind. I removed your stains from the living room floor

I am not them.

I have bourne our grief. I have carried it across continents around my neck. Hauled it across mountain tops. Tried to submerge it in the oceans which I so desperately wish had separated us at birth.

The lonliness which accompanied your loss could not be drowned by a bottle or even three. This I know now.

*

Bartering bits of my soul. There was no silencing the undoing of me.

You see

To be

Born woman

Woman of colour

Other

Is to have your tongue ripped out and stuffed down your throat

Suffocate / smother

*

"We exist through acts of demolition" she says. That is, I walked through fire without my wings and still managed to fly

Survive.

I have been dragged through more than your wreckage and lived to tell the tale.

1. Love/ loss. Everything hurts so bad right now. Again. Missing things that do not belong to me. He set fire to our house. I couldn't leave.

7. "It's hard to stop loving the ocean even after it has left you gasping - salty".

4. He tells me that I am the problem, that I enjoy conjuring up this storm, the chaos which inevitably follows and befalls on us all. Dishonesty. She tells me she never knew. They try to get you to stay.

9. Where do you go when you're not here?

3. There is nothing to go back for; the walls crumbled a long time ago. I can't leave. So I sit and try to make home in this emptiness all alone.

8. It just didn't work out.

5. You mistook yourself for a victim.

6. You mistook yourself for a survivor.

2. I can. I just won't.

Full throated love

Unadorned

I forgot where he ended and I began

That is to say, I lost myself in you

The girl I once knew

The woman I was supposed to be

In his rage he would spew that a "bitch like you" isn't worth putting his hands on. How he did in the end anyway

But it was the solitude which broke me

Ripped the stitches out my heart whole

I was meant to be a lover

//