The Art Of Rebecca Bones

Even when your silence turned sharp. Even when your mouth became a weapon. Even when I could feel the shape of you feeding on the fear that I might never again be wanted by anything less cruel. I stayed lit for you anyway. I burned and burned and called it love because I did not yet have the language for annihilation.
The room is full of your absence now. It moves like smoke. It settles into my lungs. Even now, I can still feel you. Unfinished, dark, and lingering like a promise never meant to be kept. I should have called you what you were from the beginning: not love, not salvation, but the slow undoing. The beautiful violence. The kind that left too much buried beneath what we could no longer save.
The void in me spoke through you in a voice I mistook for home.
Maybe that was the worst of it.
Not that you hurt me. Not that you left.
But that somewhere in the wreckage, I learned to thank you for the privilege. What a wickedly cruel thing. To teach a heart that consumption is communion. To make a disciple out of damage. To leave your fingerprints on a soul and call the bruising proof of something sacred.
But hear me now:
I am not your altar anymore. I am not your offering, not your temple, not the trembling thing laid beneath your hands for you to return to whenever your hunger grows lonely.
If you came back now, you would find the doors chained, the candles drowned, the altar reduced to ash. You would find me changed into something less willing to confuse being claimed with being loved.
Because I have learned there are worse things than being abandoned. One of them is being consumed so completely, you mistake survival for resurrection.
So let this be the last hymn. Let this be the last time I make a kingdom out of suffering just because you once touched it.
I will not kneel for what came to devour me.
I will not keep calling ruin holy simply because it knew my name. I became Bones in the end, because bones are what remain when everything tender has been stripped away and something in you still refuses to disappear.
Let this be what remains: not prayer, not pleading, but the sound of something almost broken learning at last how to bare its teeth back.