I left with nothing but silence.

The kind that echoes in an empty house in a storm,

after screaming winds and crying clouds have gone.

Leaving broken doors and cracked windows,

the last, cruelest, final goodbye.

I always thought love meant molding myself to fit inside someone’s idea of me,

but I outgrew the corners of your love.

Where your words yearned to keep me small-

shackled in your toxic embrace and desolate castle.

I danced barefoot through the ruins, across jagged stones and shattered glass,

aching with the weight of the love I gave you…

Softly,

like a fresh breath through dew soaked morning leaves,

she called to me, beckoning me back:

the girl I lost, buried beneath all of my ‘I’m sorries’ , the almosts, the excuses.

She didn’t ask where I’d been, only opened her arms and showed me that I was already whole.

She whispered the softest reminders,

no vows, no promises, no chains-

only the burning, raging silence, a quiet sonnet

that I am enough

and I always was

Now when I speak of love,

I speak of her.

When I speak of home,

I speak of coming home to her.

To myself.

I owe it to myself

and to you, I guess, in a far more impermanent form than I

to rejoice your life where death now deputizes

remembering a cascading smile and an unapologetic laugh,

an unapologetic look, warmth in a friendly embrace, that welcomed my adolescence.

your form so honest and genuine, accepting of all things weary, tattered, perfect and imperfect, dismantled by the hand of man

no longer here

and where am I to you?