If Love Is Like This
If love is like this, then I would rather walk away
for what we called love was only a shadow wearing its name.
There was never love, not the kind that breathes and grows;
you cannot bind me with the children to anchor what is already drowning.
What about me? What about my happiness, my dignity, my voice?
No respect, no love.
No attention, no love.
No understanding, no love
for true love is built on these foundations, stone by unshakable stone.
And ours was poured on sand, on whispers, on half-truths.
How can I be a man
when I am treated as merely a child
silenced, dismissed, reduced to an echo in my own home?
The relationship was built on the foundation of lies,
and every promise we laid cracked beneath the weight of pretense.
So I choose to let you go.
Not out of malice, but out of mercy for both of us.
My heart has been broken, my soul has been crushed
beneath the years of begging to be seen, to be heard, to matter.
So I say goodbye.
It doesn’t hurt anymore, not in the way it once did,
because my heart is already full of scars and gorges,
full of sores and wounds that learned to beat without bleeding.
Pain became my teacher when love refused to be my shelter.
Yet hear me, and hear me clearly:
I never said I will abandon my kids, neither will I neglect them.
They are my everything. They are me
my laughter in small bodies, my hope with unscarred eyes.
I release the lie we lived, but I will never release them.
I walk from the wreckage, but I carry their hands in mine.
If love is like this, then let this be the last time I mistake hunger for a feast.
I choose wholeness over a home built of splinters.
I choose to heal, even if I heal alone.
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