the ruins

i have invisible wounds from it all. not scars, because they never healed. open wounds scattered all over my inner parts. shotgun to the gut. hands to the neck. glass pieces in my heels. shivers. every time i remember it cuts that deep. ever word i write etched pain to my soul. every story, every character, every line is an homage to a piece of them. of past me. of precious youthful memories that i can never go back to.

and the saddest part is nobody knows that i was suffering.

"we're good."

"i'm over it"

"it's just good angst"

"i just have a thing for unfinished business"

"i never loved you"

"yeah i'm seeing someone right now."

"congratulations on the birth of your daughter."

"yes i am the funniest person alive."

"who's that? yeah i don't really know him"

lies after lies after lies. look at them right in the eyes as i bury my own screaming confessions. if he were to text me right now, i would still not have the guts to tell the truth.

i feel so stupid sometimes because there's still a chance that i misinterpreted every interactions and it was just in my head. that it wasn't that deep. that it was just casual. that that was how it was supposed to be. i wanted the confirmation so bad i kept holding on to the outdated evidence.

i must have been a sucker for hidden affairs, because i mourned only those who kept me in the dark. my high school best friend who was also the love of my life. supercuts guy. that one younger guy who kept buying me milk during our shared science project meetings whose parents were going through a divorce. i remember them all too well.

and of course i remember. hidden tenderness forces the receiver to become an archivist, in case nobody announces, witnesses or validates it. so i became the one who preserve every small proof myself: the look, the timing, the object, the phrasing, the way he stood a little too close, the way he did not stay but kept leaving fingerprints. i became the museum exhibiting the remnants of our doomed relationships.

but i don’t think that means i am doomed to only want what is hidden. hidden things made me feel chosen in a private language, and maybe some young part of me learned to confuse secrecy with depth. i had to teach her that love can be tender even when it’s not smuggled, that being openly chosen does not make the feeling less rare, that if someone loves her in daylight, it is not automatically less poetic — it may simply be less starving. i remember them because they mattered. but don’t confuse darkness as the price of intensity.