i loved a man who vanished long before he ever walked away,
a ghost wearing his skin, whispering lies he couldn’t sway.
his eyes—once warm—turned hollow, black as secrets never told,
and every night i slept beside him felt a thousand winters cold.
he swore there was a stranger living quiet in my closet,
a phantom lover breathing in the dark where i’d deposit
my invented sins—he said he saw the shadows move,
said he watched hands on my body he didn’t need to prove.
he told me i was moaning for a man who wasn’t real,
that he heard me whisper promises that only he could feel.
his madness wrapped around me like a serpent made of glass,
cutting every place it touched me till i didn’t know i’d pass.
he’d stand there shaking, screaming, seeing scenes that never were,
while i stood frozen, unsure, and too confused to even stir.
he accused me of the filthiest things while i just stared ahead,
like a broken doll praying he wouldn’t wish me dead.
but he did. god, he did.
he said it more times than i can count—
that the world would be better if i never made it out.
that he’d take my breath away himself if fate took too long,
as if killing me would prove that i’d been guilty all along.
his hands left blooming galaxies in purples, greens, and blues,
every bruise another chapter in a book he let me lose.
my body became a roadmap of the places he had raged,
and my soul?
it curled up small—like an animal trapped in a cage.
he broke my mind before he broke my skin;
both ways hurt, but the mental cuts always sink deeper in.
he hollowed out my confidence, he stole my sense of worth,
told me i was nothing… and i started to believe i didn’t belong on this earth.
i stopped looking in mirrors—didn’t want to see his lies,
didn’t want to face the stranger living in my own eyes.
he took my beauty straight from me and fed it to the dark,
left me rotting in the silence with a half-extinguished spark.
i lost the will to fight for breath, the will to dream or stand;
he turned my heartbeat into something that i feared more than i planned.
meth sculpted him into a monster made of chaos, rage, and smoke—
and i was collateral damage in every hallucination he awoke.
and still…
here i am, the girl that survived what should’ve killed me,
the girl who walks through echoes of a man who tried to still her.
i’m a haunting in my own home, a whisper trapped in skin,
a tired, shaking fighter who doesn’t know how to begin.
but i’m here. barely breathing.
barely sane. barely whole.
and if someone reads this, i want them to feel the toll—
the exhaustion in my bones, the collapse inside my mind,
the way trauma makes you older than the years you’ve left behind.
i want them to feel the horror of a love turned weapon-grade,
to feel how losing him was nothing next to the wreckage that he made.
and i want them to know i’m not healed— not yet, not close—
but i’m stillhere
