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 I called it love
because I didn’t 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.

Lingering like a promise
that was never meant to be kept.

I should have named you from the beginning.

Not love.

Not salvation.

But undoing.

Beautiful violence.

The kind that leaves too much buried
beneath what can’t be saved.

The void in me spoke through you
in a voice I mistook for home.

And 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 it.

What a cruel thing.

To teach a heart
that consumption is communion.

To make a disciple out of damage.

To leave fingerprints on a soul
and call the bruising 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
when 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.

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.

(I stopped calling what destroyed me love, and I finally learned how to stand in what was left of myself.)