Josie Spencer Poet Free verse

You Lit the Match

Getting dumped
shouldn’t feel like shattering,
but it did.
It cracked something deep,
a place already bruised
by months of breaking silently.
And you knew.
God, you knew.

You knew about the storms I’d weathered,
the weight I was carrying quietly,
the wounds I never wanted to reopen—
but you pried them wide
in a matter of seconds
and called it closure.

You broke me
with a smirk,
like it was nothing.

Then you turned on my best friend,
twisted the one connection I still had
until I was left
with empty air
and a hollow kind of silence
that not even crying could fill.

Two days.
That’s all it took
to lose everyone I trusted.

How did I let it happen?
How did I hand over the hammer
and thank you
for building me up
only to watch you
smash it all down?

I spent a week
sitting in corners,
faking smiles,
relearning how to introduce myself.
It was just me
and the comfort of quiet pages—
books that didn’t ask me to pretend.

Introverted.
Short-tempered.
Scared.
Trying to grow
while everything around me
was crumbling.

And when I finally tried
to explain the weight I carried,
you laughed.

You laughed.

As if mental health was a punchline.
As if trauma was a dare.
As if suicide
was something to joke about
just to see me flinch.

You mocked pain
like it was entertainment.
You turned my brokenness
into a weapon
and aimed it at me every chance you got.

And still,
I stayed.
I let it slide.
Until I didn’t.

Because even if you never saw my worth—
I finally did.

And maybe I should thank you.
Because your leaving
was the beginning
of me finding myself.

You dumped me—
and I dug myself out.

I made new friends.
Laughed real laughs.
Spoke softer,
not because I was weak,
but because I had nothing left to prove
to people who only wanted
to see me fall.

You don’t get to own
what I become.
But I’ll give you this—
you lit the match.

And now I’m fire.

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