I tried.

I imagined a return
All etched with our history.

I played Russian Roulette
With the hope
That the barrel
Could now stay empty.

Oh, I tried.

Not for a lack of trying.

Defending,
Convincing
A courtroom
To grant us immunity.

But I can’t bring myself
To rewind the clock.

To return to the cave
Of our familiarity
Where all time stopped.

Where tiptoeing and endurance
Were our game of sport.

Where escaping loneliness
Brought nothing but more.

I can’t exchange breath
For a life less.

I can’t, even if I try.

And I have tried.

It may not seem so
But I don’t need an Oracle
To foretell
What my soul now compels.

I can’t go back, Love.

For old me is no more.

I have only eyes
Into a distant unknown
Where the fear is real
But the suffocation

gone.

A reflection on the cost of going back and the reality that breaks us free with no return.

The spell that broke me free.

It’s funny how the mind works. Or maybe, it’s just our wounds.

Even though the bill was long past due, I had convinced myself to stay.

Like an enchantment I had rehearsed just the right amount, I believed that staying was noble, proof that I could weather any storm, even if it left me tired and tattered.

That endurance was the expected toll in love, and the early grays that followed were the expected consequence.

As I revisit the reason behind the decade that kept me in place, I realize I am nowhere to be found. That my reason had none of me in it, but all of him.

And funny, he may have fed me the lines, but I conjured the tale. Therein lay the wound.

Even in the moment when I drove in tears to the nearest store to gather an inordinate number of storage boxes, I left with only the three I could afford. As I shoveled the boxes into the backseat of the car, the reason took over.

What was the reason?

We are both unhappy, this I know.
But he deserves to be happy.
And I will stay until he is.
And once he is,
I will know whether to stay
Or whether to go.

And when I think about it now, I am reminded of Beauty and the Beast. The unwritten Grimms edition.

The reason that kept me from leaving was not the same reason that had me finally cross over, with no return.

The words that finally broke the spell were his, and his alone.

It’s funny how specificity works. How just the right words, with just the right cadence, texture, intensity, can jolt us back to reality, where we can’t unfeel what was felt.

Where in that moment, we can no longer dance the line.

Where all the balls we’d been juggling finally dropped. And we couldn’t reach down to pick them back up,

even if we tried.

The spell of staying.

Over time, as with every relationship and connection, friction surfaces, like a frequent, untimely guest we can’t wish away.

Friction is not unusual. In fact, it’s simply physics.

At times, it may show up as an invitation for growth and deepened understanding.

Other times, it may reveal an inevitable divide that no amount of effort can mend.

There are moments when friction returns again and again, without breath in between.

It may wear different disguises, but carries the same weight.

At first, we endure it with patience and a desire to understand.

We may tell ourselves that relationships require effort. Which they do.

We remind ourselves that growth takes time. Which it does.

And so we stay.

We stay because leaving too soon would feel like failure.

So we try again.

We wear different hats.

We step into different shoes, hoping that perhaps, this time, things will change.

We hope the other person is willing to do the same.

We hope that together, we might unearth a new path forward.

But sometimes, the same problem keeps making its return, like a weed in the hot summer months.

A different moment.

A different conversation.

A different day.

Yet somehow, still, the same wound.

And when friction repeats itself long enough, endurance can turn to fatigue.

There comes a point when we find ourselves replaying the same cinematic plot.

We imagine walking away, only to circle back around the block.

Each time, we convince ourselves that perhaps we could try once more.

We may promise ourselves that if we were to leave, it would be because we have given everything we could.

We may tell ourselves that we will not leave early.

We will not leave halfway.

We will not leave until there is nothing more to give.

Eventually, for some, that moment arrives.

Sometimes it may come after a single sentence spoken in anger or pain.

Sometimes it comes quietly, in the stillness of our own reflections.

But when it arrives, it carries with it a force of clarity that cannot be undone.

In that moment, we realize that we did indeed try. Perhaps more than necessary.

We defended the connection.

We pleaded its case in the courtroom of our minds.

Then, at last, the courtroom closes.

Not out of bitterness. Not out of defeat. But out of knowing.

We have given what we could.

We have loved how we could.

And all that is left to offer is what remains of ourselves, surrendering into quiet obscurity.

So if and when that time comes, we may find ourselves bowing out.

Not always gracefully, but honestly.

We depart from the shared path and step onto a new one, where each cobblestone feels unfamiliar and unsettling to the touch.

There may be moments when we find ourselves wanting to return to the courtroom to make an appeal.

But we can’t go back, even if we tried.

Because the cost of going back could well be losing ourselves, once more.

And that is a price we may no longer be willing to pay.

A fallen angel,
Or so it seems,
In search of a Red Bull
To return your wings.

Your thirst quenched
With just enough.
Leaving faint traces of lips
Until your next rush.

And for a moment
I betrayed my own will,
Surrendered to the matador
When I was never built to kneel.

So I must warn you now,
Before the red cloth lifts:

I am not your Red Bull,
To raise you from your fall.

I am the Red Bull.

And I was
never
yours
at all.

A reflection on self-reclamation in spaces that fail to honour our humanity and reduce our gifts to expectation.

A power misplaced.

Each time he walked away, I was left barren, carrying the emotional imprints of that moment.

The staged air kisses.

The irresponsible “I love yous.”

Each time, it seemed like déjà vu, the return of a familiar season.

And each time he left, there was naught but fog.

I saw the bare minimum.

I felt the inconsistency.

I heard the language whiplash.

The performance of a troubled soul who had mastered his own stage.

I was no victim.

I participated.

But I alone bore the burdens of the loyal, empathetic, and consciously aware, as my growing pains hadn’t yet reached their ceiling.

Because I could, I did.

I tolerated.

I sought to understand.

I caught moments of vulnerability that compelled me to stay.

Moments of pain that gifted me a glimpse of his humanity.

I was not in obsession, but confusion.

And my confusion needed coherence.

My body was the prosecutor and my mind the defendant:

Always understanding, always caring, always hoping.

Filling in the blanks where clarity already stood.

Maybe if I changed the frame to something clearer, more stable, I would be met.

But the frame was always deflected as I found myself pulled back into his chaos.

Like a matador in command of the volta, I chased the red cloth as if it were truth. An endless pursuit that only ended once I stopped charging.

When I finally awoke to my power, I came to realize that it was never lost or newly found. It had simply been misplaced.

And once I did.

Once the dust had settled in the arena,
all that remained
was my absence.

The cost of staying.

Not always visible, but always carried:

The invisible weight of our lived journeys.

Journeys that have come to shape how we think, why we act, and where we are emotionally.

Whether in active pursuit of growth or turning to distraction in the face of hardship, neither makes one superior to the other. Just different.

There are those who walk into connections with motivations and unhealed patterns that wound. Some are aware, while others simply carry limitations.

Whether those limitations speak to a need for more life experience, or to someone who is unwilling or has yet to face themselves.

Regardless, those very same limitations and harmful behaviours can cause pain and hurt to those who choose to stay.

The feeling of not being seen or considered can be a destabilizing experience.

We may find our bodies existing on the same plane, yet only one of our inner worlds is left behind.

Instead of a shared home, we alone become the refuge and source of emotional restoration.

We feel reduced to only what is useful and beneficial, without recognition for all our wonder and complexity.

And often we stay, not because we are blind to the pain, but because we find ourselves holding on to the burdens of our care, empathy, kindness, and love.

We may have the capacity to hold others and witness their full humanity, even in their carelessness and confusion.

And yet, the tragic irony still finds us:

The very energy we give to compensate for their irresponsibility is the very same energy that drains us, repeatedly.

And still, at the start of every cycle, we find ourselves expected to return with more.

There comes a time when our bodies remind us that we are not replenishable in spaces where reciprocity is lacking.

Just because we can endure, must we? And to what end?

Maybe it’s because we haven’t come to truly appreciate our gifts. Or maybe that is the problem itself; we haven’t come to accept them as such.

We still move in humility, believing that we are simply who we are. A belief that can make those gifts feel expected in spaces where they can be mishandled or treated as disposable.

And so, we hesitate, because claiming it feels too close to ego.

But maybe it is simply recognition, with honoring. To recognize the importance of what we offer and to honor what that means.

Knowing that it isn’t binary. That honoring ourselves does not mean becoming less loving, but protecting ourselves from spaces that don’t allow us to love fully.

Realizing that blaming ourselves for being too much or giving, where we call our identity into question, only deepens the wound.

And maybe that is where the shift happens.

Not because we have it all figured out, but because something has been recognized.

So instead of defining ourselves solely by who we are, we can also define ourselves by what we need.

Where we ask:

Is this a connection that fuels me?

Is this where I want to pour my energy?

Is this how I want to be met?

In doing so, we can clear the path for power and agency to return.

Not perfectly.

Not all at once.

But enough to move forward, even with the residues left for us to mend.

We can begin to shed the roles that diminish us and move towards reclaiming ourselves, where our self-worth, depth, needs, and boundaries no longer need to kneel.

Chased by the ghosts
of relationships past.

They swarm as echoes,
mouthing language
beyond my compass.

Translation has all but failed,
with no more soul or shame
to feed the veil.

So I retire my voice
into the silence.

Stepping out of the shivers
and into my body,

where the true present begins.

A reflection on breaking the spell of old relational wounds and releasing the haunting narratives that once bound us.

Each time I met a different relational end, I inched my way closer to resigned clarity:

That there will be relationships that stay with us as we evolve,

Those that carry a strength in the summertime, yet quiet down in the darkness of winter.

And those that eventually meet their end.

Even so, it is the deepest bonds, where we lay our vulnerability bare, that have the power to shape us beneath language or reason.

It is the ones with no return that can come with the most demons and heartbreak.

Yet it is where our becoming awaits, like a portal at the crossroads of a haunted, unlit road that only we can travel.

I myself didn’t know what to expect as the door to a past chapter, weighted with history, came to a close.

I thought integrity and care would carry me through:

That navigating the grief and pain would be clean,

That healing would move forward neatly,

And that life would somehow re-order itself.

Some might call it naivety, others, wishful thinking. It is leaning towards the ideal and what it promises, instead of bracing for what has already been revealed.

We have no control over how a chapter ends or what lingers in its wake.

The most heart-wrenching ones leave behind ghosts. Not the people themselves, but the stories they tell. The versions of us shaped through their fears and pain, and sometimes, our own.

It is a haunting that arrives uninvited. Ghosts steeped in a language of old patterns and wounds, leaving us questioning our sanity.

They speak narratives that no longer match our truth.

They continue to circulate stories of who we once were. Versions that take hold faster than our will to correct them.

We find ourselves staring at a spinning compass, adjusting with each step in the hopes of finding steady ground.

There is a certain exhaustion that arrives when we find ourselves slowly consumed by all the echoes.

We can’t outrun them.

We can’t rewrite every retelling.

We can’t plead for understanding.

We can’t make others see us clearly when their sights have already been set.

And it is from this depletion that withdrawal finds its eventual place.

Some losses come with explanation. Others don’t.

As we grow, we will lose people.

And the people we lose become part of that ghostly chorus.

Not because we have failed, but because we have finally reached the crossroads of no return.

Because clarity and boundaries don’t travel well with everyone.

Because silence is a power that speaks louder than any explanation could reclaim.

And in order to exorcise the ghosts, we must be willing to starve them.

What is still ours to choose is release, so we can be free to fully step into the present:

Where we start to focus on the horizon,

Where new connections replace the old,

And where the bonds we make can witness us without the distortions of the past.

We can’t govern the ghosts from our past. But we can govern our story onward.

And that is more than enough to carry us into our next chapter.

I laid down for you,
A loyal summons to your court.
To be buried willingly
In the soil that we called love.

With depth, I submerged
Like a martyr resolved.
And as the quiet took hold,
I could no longer hear myself.

Minutes on to hours.
Hours on to days.
Days turned to weeks.
Years into a decade.

The heartbeat fell faint
As skin kissed the bone.
The search for something true
To feed me whilst alone.

Day by day,
The hunger grew.
Tremors loud,
The groans were fuel.

Driving me to crawl
Past the soil that we called love,
To seek refuge above surface
Where the heartbeat was strong.

A reflection on self-sacrifice in love and the courage it takes to finally choose ourselves.

I was ten years in when I finally faced my reflection in the mirror.

The greys in my hair, all dulled with gloom.

The heaviness of my body with nowhere to hide.

The sunken tiredness of my expression under gravity’s pull.

Who was this stranger?

And how did we get here?

As I ponder in the aftermath, I find myself noticing the ways in which we often interchange humility with being tolerable.

And from these moments, we find ourselves surrendering our permission to exist as we were meant to be.

We inherit quiet instructions about how to be in relationship with others.

They can shape:

How we show up.
How we behave.
How we carry ourselves in roles we never consciously chose.

And when we fail to meet those roles, it can feel like a failure of self.

So, in an effort not to be branded as such, we start surrendering pieces of ourselves.

They often start off small, almost negligible, like breadcrumbs.

But over time, those breadcrumbs have a way of turning into bread.

Until one day we look in the mirror and no longer recognize the person staring back.

With this harsh awakening, we start to resist the continued erasure of our existence.

We set out on a journey to rediscover who we once were.

Before agency fell prey to compromise.

Before goodwill turned sacrificial.

And from it grows a hunger. A need.

A desire to return home to ourselves.

And if that return means leaving a present that is unhealthy or misaligned, pain becomes the inevitable threshold.

Because how we wake up each morning reveals a truth that can’t be avoided:

Whether we awaken as weighted corpses or souls lit from within.

For when it is all said and done in this one lifetime, the greatest honour that we are deserving to claim is that we lived as ourselves, even in the name of love.

I don’t need you.
I never needed you.
But I chose you.

A companion to fare the weather,
Across shame and purgatory.

To hold sacred shade for one another,
And bear witness to our depths.

I don’t need a background symphony.
But a brick house at the fore,
To brace the heavy storms of our humanity.

Hands intertwined in vow and lore.

A reflection on chosen love and the rarity of those who hold us steady through life’s storms.

I have yet to reach my lifetime, and even in my years lived, that feeling still reverberates:

The sensation of relief and surrender, felt most deeply when one is truly met.

To find a connection willing, without demand, and with a decided commitment to stand by and weather the world of life with us.

One able to see us in our full humanity and to bear witness with chosen love and acceptance.

To be a sacred companion in the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.

That rarity is not a guarantee.

It’s a gift only made possible if we are willing to throw our bottle into the sea and see where the waters take us.

Sometimes we find ourselves believing that we have found that person. Only to discover that we were imprinting capacities that they were never meant to hold.

We then come to realize that the only knowing lies in observation. In how one shows up when not tested or managed.

And from there, knowing that the choice belongs to us.

That even though our humanity yearns for external witnessing, it has to start with us.

And should we ever find ourselves in the presence of someone willing to walk through the chapters of life with us, hand in hand, don’t neglect the handcuffs and keys.

Keep them close.

Not because they are promised to us.

But because they have chosen, with intention, to hold us through transformation and evolution.

To love us not because we are needed, but because we are chosen.

And when that choice is reciprocated.

Now that’s where the true rarity lies.

He reached for a booty he could not find,
For in his mind, I should have fit the stereotype from the ‘Gram.

Chocolate skin, thick hips,
Glutes by the gram.

Yet there was nothing but lean meat and bone
For half his hand.

He grabbed for myth,
And finally met truth.

Reality shooketh.

Oh, hot damn.

A reflection on what it means to stay embodied in a world where projections permeate.

This story speaks to a time when my body had changed drastically in the aftermath of recovery.

Once upon a time, there was a woman with a booty of volume. And this booty crossed paths with the hands of a person who thought he’d find again what he once held.

But later down the road, he all but met its remains.

That moment stays seared into memory: hands in frantic sway, searching for an El Dorado that he could no longer find.

What a vulnerable place to be.

Living in constant comparison to the fabrications of a manmade ideal. A standard that not only spans gender but also race and ethnicity.

If we were to distance ourselves from the ideal long enough, we would soon come to realize that our bodies carry rich and beautiful histories, from pain to evolution to recovery.

They embark on different journeys, and whoever is invited along the way may not always be curious about where we are on the path or how we arrived.

We may be met with judgment or scrutiny for a self that some cannot comprehend. And if they are unwilling to meet our stories, we can easily fall under the weight of that scrutiny.

Whether it is the booty, the bosom, or the scars that have taken permanence, our worth is not dictated by others who haven’t lived our story.

We are not subjects to appease.

We are the owners and authors.

And may we continue to honour its lived experience and continued evolution.

You are the well that runneth,
Spilling into overflow
From every pore of your tender soul.

Drawn to your fountain,
Three travellers make their way through:
Surface, Mid, and Deep Root.

Surface wanted only a taste.
For more would have had them braced for escape.

Mid was of thirst and needed a cup.
For more would have had them all welled up.

Deep Root was unlike the rest of the pool,
Parched and longing to be swallowed in full.

To stay firmly rooted,
And be one less a traveller.

A reflection on what it means to hold depth in a world that often drinks in sips.

In each of us lives a rich complexity.

This is where our vulnerabilities, fears, love, and passions harbour. A summation of a soul embodied.

Some of us regulate the well. Others are an overflow of it.

And in that overflow, it is natural that it will stir up different reactions in different people.

It might make some curious, yet also scared by its honesty. It might make others lean in, wanting a taste of its self-possession, yet unable to hold it with care. And when it becomes too much for them, they may fall back, retreating to their familiar.

Then there are those who are simply in awe of it.
They want to stand with it.

To swim with it.
To give to it.
To feed it.

The key is to recognize that none of these interactions is indicative of our worth.

They merely reflect the capacity of how far each person can travel into our depths.

We are not meant to shrink and shrivel, nor are we meant to overflow for those who cannot stay.

The relationships to feed are the ones that feed us, too.

They are the ones who run toward our current.
The ones who honour our power.

They are not afraid of our depth.
Instead, they choose to merge with it.