Slide Off The Moon

I was the afterthought child... the flicker behind a brighter flame, the forgotten verse in someone else's song. I learned to eat silence like bread, learned to curl small enough to fit in the shadows of rooms that never asked me to enter. There is a lineage in me not of blood, but of leaving. Every time I reached out, I came back holding air and the soft echo of my own too-muchness. I have worn every shape a woman can break into... the spare friend, the misfit lover, the sibling whose name is met with polite sighs and lukewarm glances. Only my father, only my grandparents, saw the cathedral in my chest before the ivy took it. And now they're ash, and I still kneel in the chapel of their memory begging for the warmth that doesn't visit anymore. Even love, when it came, tasted like apology. They talked to me, looked at me like something they'd someday have to explain or erase. I ruin things. I touch the tender parts and they bruise. Not because I want to, but because I w...

You were the pulse in a room gone quiet, the breath behind glass I never could break. And I, with hands too full of my own ruin, let you slip still aching for the weight of you. I never meant to drag you through my flood. Hurt swells like a tide in me, and I forget how not to drown the ones who try to reach in. Forgive me. For how I made silence a weapon, for every sharp word disguised as defense, for the way I bled abandonment onto you and called it love. You didn’t deserve the shadows I threw. Now you haunt my unmade bed, the bridge of every song I can’t skip. I want to live in the flicker between waking and dream where you always stay. I still feel you. Still wonder if you feel me too in the space between the chorus and the collapse. I was never trying to leave. I just didn’t know how to stay without setting fire to everything.

I touch what I love and it splits at the seams. Like silk held in stormlight— too fragile for my heat. I never meant to bleed on everything, but my hands have mouths and they’re always starving. I don’t know how to be touched without shattering. I don’t know how to be seen without disappearing. So write it down the damage report, chalk outlines of everything I swore I’d never break. Am I the flood or the vessel? Am I the ghost or the ache? I watch them blink in slow retreat— those who once reached for me. Like I loved too loud. Like I needed too long. But I only ever wanted someone to stay and not vanish when the dark came, not protest when the lighting flashed. They call it ruin, missing pieces of Self every time I chose love with trepidation. Of every time I stayed when the silence was deafening. Am I still breathing in the aftermath? Still praying my daughter never learns to measure her worth like I do I am the storm. When will the rain fall softly? Let me fall into hands that don’...