When You Leave

Your presence

quakes through me…

seismic, splitting bone from skin.

Your voice:

an aftershock of memories

too intense to be real.

Like a fever dream I can still taste,

but can’t hold.

I study your gestures,

the chaos in your movement,

your contrasts,

your wounds.

I want your mind,

I crave your body,

I dissolve in your mouth.

I melt into your kisses,

collapse in your arms,

vanish inside your stare.

I fall in love with your soul,

its shadows, its cracks,

its soft decaying beauty.

I rub my face against your knife-blade beard

knowing it cuts,

loving the sting.

The wound never closes.

I reopen it every time

our mouths collide like the world’s ending.

You awaken my masochist.

I fell for the one who bruises me.

Some call it cocaine.

I should call you God.

Because you take everything,

leave nothing.

a holy ghost hallucinated by the lonely.

A parasite we worship

to explain our pain.

I pray to you in silence,

and you whisper back,

never promises,

just heat,

just breath.

I try to imagine a life with you...

no lies, no time, no shame.

But I see nothing.

You made sure I believed

you have nothing to give.

I love you without saying it.

I give myself without warning,

knowing you’ll drop me

just as easily

as you undress me.

And it will hurt.

It already hurts.

Not because I didn't expect it,

but because I convinced myself you wouldn't.

I’m hopelessly in love

with everything you are

and everything you bury.

You evolve,

and I rot,

waiting for your arrival.

You inside me

sets off chemical fireworks:

dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline.

A circus of hormones

screaming: stay.

And then,

the silence of your absence.

The echo of the door slamming

becomes a siren in my skull.

“Enjoy the silence,” I say.

But this silence

has teeth.

I can’t shut up.

I just want to scream.

To cry.

You had me completely,

and now you’re a ghost.

Tinnitus screams louder.

Sleep is war.

My heart roams, rabid,

searching for you.

How do I explain

that I tried to love carefully,

but ended up

losing my mind?

I look in the mirror.

I’m someone else.

You’ve become my addiction,

my self-harm,

my velvet-wrapped blade.

After weeks of no sleep,

no thought, just raw nerve,

I decide:

I’m cutting you out.

I grabbed the kitchen knife.

No anesthetic.

Cracked open my chest.

There you were.

So easy to find.

So hard to kill.

I sliced the heart in half

while screaming,

have mercy, you beautiful fucker!

Bloody on the kitchen floor,

I stitched myself up,

but your half kept beating,

defiant, romantic,

refusing to die.

What kind of witchcraft is this?

You’re not in me anymore,

but you’re still alive,

a tumor with rhythm,

dancing in defiance.

I’m dying slowly,

naked and shaking,

watching that stubborn chunk of heart

throb for you.

My vision blurs.

Breath shallow.

You’re the last hallucination,

your smirk,

your eyes like black holes.

Allison, is this real?

No.

But this is how it feels,

when you leave.

Inner Voice

My inner voice told me to stray from the path before going home.

To take the long way,

the one where words spill slowly,

where silence hides between the lines,

and truth is only whispered under moonlight.

It’s a double-tongued force,

both warning and seduction.

I had no one to talk to,

no warmth to wrap around me,

only the wind, the storm,

and the ache beneath my ribs.

I am romantic… shamefully so.

Like a magician with a clumsy trick.

Like falling for someone

even when you know you’ll bleed.

I cried in silence

as the memories kissed me...

soft, then sharp.

I got lost in his orbit,

swallowed by the gravity of his restraint.

And when I finally got home,

I couldn’t keep the disguise on.

The mask cracked.

I broke in front of him.

And without a word, he held me.

That kind of embrace that needs no answers,

but speaks in stillness:

You’re safe now.

This is your shelter.

Here, no harm will find you.

And still,

his arms silenced the chaos,

yet woke the grief,

not with judgment,

but by the echo of all I left unspoken.

My inner voice is my poison,

and my cure.

So tonight, under stars that witnessed it all,

I choose to find myself again.

I reclaim the helm,

not to escape the storm,

but to learn how to move through it with grace.

I will keep my heart intact,

collect the parts I failed to track.

My inner voice is here to stay,

I have no choice but to learn its dialect.

Oh, inner voice…

Look at the sea and the storm we summoned.

Feel the weight of the waves

crashing with memories.

Listen,

the wind is trying to guide us.

We are not enemies,

only the same breath, carried by different currents.

This ship won’t sink,

not if we steer together.

No map will bind me, I’m both ship and sea,

a sailor bold enough to collide,

charting the depths of what it means to be free.