Match my yearn

When you miss me,

don’t come crawling back to the echoes of my name.

Go laugh with the same mouths

that whispered poison into your ears,

the same hands that dragged my love

through the mud until you no longer recognized it.

When the nights turn too long,

don’t search for my voice in the silence,

search for theirs.

Let their false comfort cradle you

the way my loyalty once did.

Let them stitch your wounds shut

with the same thread of doubt

they used to tear us apart.

I was there.

God, I was there.

Every crack you carried, I tried to fill.

Every ache, I made my own.

I bent myself into shapes

I didn’t even recognize anymore,

just so you would never have to feel

like you were standing alone in the fire.

And still,

you chose their shadows over my light.

So don’t miss me.

Miss the moments you killed with silence.

Miss the love you threw away

because it came from my chest instead of theirs.

Miss the home I built in my hands for you,

the one you burned down

because someone else told you

my bricks were fragile.

And when the emptiness comes,

because it will,

don’t call it longing, don’t call it regret.

Call it justice.

Call it the ghost of the person

who only ever loved you

and was repaid with suspicion.

When you miss me,

don’t you dare come looking.

I won’t be waiting.

I’ll be buried under the weight

of every unanswered word,

every night I cried myself hollow

because loyalty meant nothing

in the court of your doubt.

When you miss me,

let the guilt eat you alive.

Let it sit in your chest

the way your betrayal sat in mine.

Let it destroy you.

Because that’s the only piece of me

I carry the sea in my veins,

but they keep trying to drown me in concrete.

Skyscrapers rise like cages,

crowds move like tides I can’t swim in,

and every sun that sets here

feels borrowed, unfamiliar, false.

They call it a city

I call it a sentence.

Every street is a reminder

that my footsteps don’t belong here,

that my silence is louder than their language,

that the garden I dream of blooms

a thousand miles away,

behind the wing of a plane

that may never take me back.

How do I explain this grief?

That exile is not just distance,

it is dismemberment.

It is watching your soul rot in a place

that never asked for it,

never wanted it,

never knew how to hold it.

I came from the middle of the ocean

and here I am, choking on air.

The salt of my home still stings my mouth,

yet every word I speak here

turns into dust before it can reach anyone.

They will never understand the silence I carry,

the way leaving carves an eternal wound,

the way belonging becomes a myth

when you’ve been ripped from its soil.

Mom

when I say I’m coming home,

I don’t mean the house,

I don’t mean the street,

I don’t even mean the island.

I mean the part of me

that this place has been killing

slowly, beautifully, cruelly.

And if I never make it back,

know that I died searching,

died screaming without sound,

died longing for a home

that maybe never existed anywhere

and broke it,

not with the elegance of plates shattering,

but with the brutality of a butcher’s blade

mincing flesh into pieces too small to count.

I stayed awake for nights,

on the floor of my own mind,

picking through the shards

with bleeding fingers,

trying to fit them back into something

that looked like me.

You were the last person I thought

could make me stutter on the word betrayal.

And yet,

here I am,

choking on it like a mouthful of glass.

Even then,

I smiled when I saw you.

Because for me,

you were home.

But now I know,

even homelands can betray their own people.

Still, I waited.

God, I waited.

For you to come back,

to hold the crying child

that still sobs inside me,

to glue the shards together

and tell me I wasn’t unlovable.

But you didn’t.

You were where you always wanted to be,

far from me.

And I was stranded

in the place I feared most:

nowhere.

A land without maps,

without light,

without a name.

I crept into corners I shouldn’t have,

because there was nowhere else to go.

I begged, Oh i begged,

on knees against rotting ground,

face tilted to an endless seeming sky,

but you never came.

Now, I just stand here,

in the doorway of something closing.

The door refuses to lock,

as if mocking me.

As if saying:

You will always leave it open for them.

And maybe I will.

Maybe that is my curse,

to guard an unlocked door

All I ever gave you was devotion, and I asked only for its reflection. It feels almost diabolical, the way love can turn into a ghost of itself. It’s not that you were empty, you showed me tenderness, once. But perhaps it was never enough. Perhaps your heart had been rationed, saving its richest portions for another.

If only you had paused to think.

If only you had realised how easily this collapse could have been averted, by something as small as a single, honest text.

Of all the ways to lose a soul,

A quiet grave is mercy’s toll.

For death at least is honest, clean,

It doesn’t ghost you in between.

It doesn't leave the door ajar,

Then vanish like a falling star.

It doesn’t text and never call,

Or watch you drown and let you fall.

It doesn’t smile with empty eyes,

Or hug you full of hidden lies.

It won’t pretend that you still bloom

While dragging you from room to room.

No, death comes once, and that is all.

But they come back to let you crawl,

They leave mid-sentence, mid-repair,

Then haunt you while still breathing air.

They say, “I love you,” out of tune,

Then disappear beneath the moon.

They rot the flowers that you give,

Then ask you why you failed to live.

And what of silence that still breathes?

What of the ache that never leaves?

When someone’s gone but never gone,

You mourn them every breaking dawn.

You pass them on the street one day,

Their eyes look yours, then drift away.

They say your name like it means less

Than dust that clings to Sunday dress.

And when you cry, they do not hear,

For living ghosts don't lend an ear.

They look alive, they seem so kind,

But grief like that rewires your mind.

Give me a coffin, sealed and low,

A grave I know, where I can go.

Not this museum of what-ifs,

Not time that bleeds in phantom cliffs.

For death, though cold, at least is true,

It doesn’t stay, then unchoose you.

It doesn’t wear your favorite scent,

Then claim it never knew what it meant.

It doesn’t laugh in other arms,

Or weaponize your softer charms.

It doesn’t breathe the same raw air

And act like you were never there.

So if you leave, then leave me dead.

Don’t linger like a thread unthread.

Be cruel, be gone, be sealed in stone,

But do not pretend I'm not alone.

For of all the ways to break a heart,

The cruelest is to stay then part.

Yes, death, my dear, may steal the breath,

But life can mimic it far worse than death.

So I’ll take coffins over calls,

Graves instead of gaslit halls.

Because in loss, I’ve come to see,