Prescription, List, Liturgy, Psalms, Epiphany. In That Order.

 I have checked every box on every list they’ve made about how to get over someone. I carefully followed each like a recipe: “Do not reach out,” “Do not seek the past,” don’t do this, don’t do that.” I obeyed. I followed every guide; they showed me the wound but never stopped the bleeding.

I wanted the list to accelerate the process but the process went through me like a bullet, straight ahead, leaving a chamber behind. Hollow, echoing, ready to host new traumas. If you look closely you’ll see the hole in my chest, if you peer through it you’ll notice how I haven’t known any purpose since then.

I made a museum of the shipwreck, studying it from each angle as if a new view could reveal something I missed. Yet every autopsy, every study, showed the same verdict: it wasn’t lack of love, just cowardice, summoning all dead ends. I stand at the same shoreline I saw you depart from, like any given tide will bring revelation.

The thing is: I recognized the end, long before I could digest it but that didn’t necessarily make me ready. like a record skipping over the same wound. knowledge? Just words. From teeth to the outside, never inwards. Now I’m terrified, anguished and running out of time. In a way that has little to do with storms: sooner than later it will be a year since. And I haven’t moved from the crime scene. I still ponder at the memory of you, saying you loved me and not doing anything about it. I knew the war was over and I had lost. I even, at my weakest, began to believe I might be the problem. Even that diagnosis feels like a puzzle whose pieces refuse to fit.

All I know is nothing has hurt that much since.

You corroded my identity. I’m still unsure which way to look, where to go. People mistake freedom for what it is: loneliness. I can go anywhere I want just not home. I keep learning how to live inside a body that remembers you in every bone. Near-death experience.

Strangers stare at me like I’m missing a limb, I fully intend cross the street without looking both ways but they all stop at the sight of me like I’m a stop sign. They all can see I’m missing something yet no one can point out what is.

Maybe it’s just me?

But, alas, not effective.

No prescription, no lists, no liturgies, no psalms and no epiphany

Nothing has reanimated my heart.

September 15, 2025.

Adriana 

 A broken ego tossed down the drain, a humming echo of a past that still resonates, a heart that beats out of habit instead of will. Bandaids on bullet holes that won’t stop the bleeding. silence so dreadful, you can hear your right ear ringing. ill-fated love story. if you knew there was to be a car crash in the greatest ride of your life, would you still hop in? I stare at the wreckage. from a place I never thought I'd be standing. I see it differently now. It doesn’t matter because the ship was always meant to sink. Exiled from my dreams. It’s not that we are not good people, but good people hold knives too. Sometimes to protect us, sometimes pressed against the throat of the other. My therapist asked why I didn't realize the worst part. That we were in love. Palpable, sunken, driven, covered. In love. It was all around us. Love wove itself into every breath, every glance, every word we exchanged. Why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance? You drove me to the edge but didn’t throw me off. If my heart was on your table, if my longings tied around your chest, if my prayers kept going to a wordless God—WHY. My therapist wants to know why I can’t accept the fact. You loved me once. In your own way. I did as well. But I can’t grasp the idea of it. Then, I’d have to explain why we fell out of it. I'd have to admit what we once splurged on, we lack now. It faded like the mist. Like everything does at the end. I told you in a poem once, I’m afraid of beautiful things. I fear them because I know they don’t last. everything in its prime has to wither. Winter comes, birds fly south, the most ardent love story ends in a poem abandoned mid-thought, lost before it can be finished. It’s not that I don’t want to write about you, I just don’t have the courage to. How did it end? We raced towards a goal that was non-existent. we fell off the edge of earth. We hugged so tight we deflated the dreams we were supposed to build. We carved apologies but not too deep so they didn’t demand change. Everything ends. there’s no prose to wrap it all up. Hurricanes dissipate, tornadoes settle. I am left standing in the eye of it all, unsure of how to uncurl my fists, how to stop waiting for a punch that won’t land, how to stop screaming at the void for a reason that will never come. Something is crawling out of my gut, a truth I’m not ready to face. Where were the clues? Where do I trace the string back to that first fracture in the glass that held all the promises we made? There’s a piece of the puzzle we created together that’s missing, there’s a rock at the bottom of the ocean heavy with all my secrets, there’s a wall on your side of town guarding your cowardice. a fortress you never let me breach. I’m, slowly, unlearning, our, dance. Through whispers, screams, howls, sighs, and the sinking feeling that we’re done. There’s a missing piece. I can’t reconnect the wires that make me.

Touching on Love's Aftermath

You didn’t notice how every room started sounding like goodbye
and me stepping into each, thinking you were calling me.
Like a ghost, summoned by its own delusion,
Because I dared to hope it wasn’t real.

There is a crater where we called home
I blew it up.
With a shaking hand from the weight of how bad we let things end.
I couldn’t stand the idea of 
four walls remembering us better than we remember each other.

So I tore the house down.
Wall by wall, frame by frame.
Each window showed me what we could have been.
but all doors... led nowhere.
I plucked petals from a dead flower,
pretending the ending was ever in my control.

You think I don’t hurt because I left,
how do I put in words my heart is gnawing at my chest?
trying to find a way back to something buried a while ago.

Every love song we liked
crawls into my skin in the dead of night
Like your hands did when reaching
for one last hug.
When you swore you’d never leave.

Your cowardice put a noose in my throat.
it gets tighter
every time you don’t call.
Now all defeats taste like your absence.
Forever living in a month by your name.
I cannot look at my hands.

And you still don’t see it,

July. 

1, 2025

A Bad Swirl / Bad Joke

August 25, 2025

After 10 months playing chess with my feelings, a swirl of emotions I kept rearranging, the truth is coming to the surface. I thought that if I aligned my chakras, finished the puzzle of our demise, and found just the right words... I’d level up and erase the bad joke that it was to love you.

Sadly, after ashes settled and new friends became acquaintances I don't plan to keep, I realized:

 You said things you never meant. You loved me but didn’t actually want to do something about it. You liked my shine only when it lit you up. That you need everyone else’s approval to convince yourself I was enough. Do you know what that does to a person? It makes them claw at their own skin, searching for a light that's gone, wondering if they ever had it to begin with.

So I left, moved cities, started over, filled my days with work, noise and new friends, anything to make me forget but the seat across the table at the café, is still empty on Sundays and my laughter only lasts half as long as it did when you were the one calling it out of me. My life is full but I am empty and that emptiness is shaped exactly like you.

I thought leaving would cauterize the wound but healing smells like burning flesh. I thought reasons and excuses would set me free, but all they did was wrap the cage in prettier words.

Nowadays, my silence has grown teeth. I saw it first, when you shook your head at my eyes, looking for more of the spark you'd already taken: I became a punchline, of a really bad, bad joke. You said I love you, it felt like a punch. I walked through glass, moved as a corpse.

At some point I tried tearing the pain out by the root. Even if I had to pluck strand by strand the heartache but it was like guessing which cord to cut on a ticking bomb. Chaos everywhere. I desperately, wanted, to rip my heart out of its ribcage, pretend that work is satisfying, my new friends are thrilling, and that alone would make life worth living...

I got away

With everything.

But no one told me the emptiness would swallow my life whole. It wasn’t just the coffee table, it was my jokes, my laughter, my will… Nobody warned me what would happen next. They just said I deserved the best. No one told me I’d birthed another version of me, unwittingly, settling into a life I never dreamt of. I never dodged you, I carry you, lodged in my body somewhere.

it has been almost a year, and the bad feeling keeps kicking my gut, rotting at the center of me. 

Yet no one sees it. No one warns you that grief this ugly wears makeup well. That you can sit across from someone, order another coffee, smile, and inside your chest there is still a fucking battlefield.

Now that the bad joke is told, i don't see anyone laughing...

Except, maybe you.