The Version of Me That Left.

There is a version of me that stayed too long,

bleeding out over thresholds,

shaping his bones into furniture

so everyone else could sit comfortably.

I don’t recognize his face in the glass,

yet I owe him my lungs.

He swallowed the poison I now spit out.

He knelt in the dirt so I could stand.

Survival isn't a reinvention;

it's stripping off skin that doesn't fit anymore.

And it demands a reckoning:

mourning the ghost who didn't know the blade,

mourning the hours burned to ash,

mourning the love poured into empty cups.

I don't pity him. I carve his name into the door.

Without his ruined hands,

I would never have learned how to smash it open.