Your Narrative Needs an Audience
Filled with empty words and fake promises,
I sit still within the story that was written.
I believed the story you wrote for us,
because I wanted the ending to be...
different this time.
That was my part.
I stayed too long inside a burning house
that you kept calling our home.
Every single time,
you picked up the pen.
Every single time,
I became your new blank page.
You rewrote every memory I had of myself
until I started turning every page in your favor.
You called it healing.
You called it honesty.
You called it patience.
You called it love.
You needed a villain,
so you dressed me in shadow
and called it our story.
You handed strangers a carefully curated
version of me
that sounded the cleanest
from your mouth.
I used to lie beside you all night,
wide awake,
while you slept so peacefully
next to the damage.
I wondered who would believe you.
I wondered if I should defend myself,
explain myself...
though I was never allowed.
Or if I should correct the shape
of the knife in your hand.
With a smile,
you called it a mirror.
I almost spent the rest of my life
arguing with what was written
inside a book
I was never even allowed
to help write.
But truth does not need a crowd to clap for it.
Truth does not dress itself in pretty little bows
and beg the room to choose a side.
So keep me as the villain
if your story cannot stand straight
without my name,
bent crooked inside it.
Keep repeating yourself until the echoes sound like proof.
The people who saw it up close already know.
They saw the pattern.
They saw the performance.
They saw what you called love
when no one else was watching.
I am done shrinking
so you can look innocent.
I am done providing my blood
as ink for a book
that you never planned to read honestly.
You promised chapters
you never intended to write.
You built tomorrow out of fog
and asked me to call it our future.
The villain in that story
sleeps just fine
knowing exactly who they are.
And more importantly,
who they are not.
I am not the final chapter
you wrote to excuse the rest.
I am not the proof
that your hands were clean.
I am not the silence you mistook for guilt,
or the shame
you left at my door.
I was the witness.
I was the one who remembered.
I was the one who kept reading after every page kept changing.
Your narrative needs a stage
and an audience willing to listen.
Mine just needs silence
behind a locked door.
Because the future I thought we could have together
was only a trailing thought.
An elusive idea.
An unfinished book left open in a burning house
neither of us lives in anymore.
When every page of that book
is filled with empty words
and fake promises,
when the book lies alone
in the ashes of what we once called home,
a question stands among its remains.
Tell me...
When the crowd stops clapping
and the air goes still.
When the room empties
and the lights go out.
When what was written
becomes illegible.
Who finishes writing it,
if it was never meant to be complete?
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