Reclaimed
I did not leave like a storm.
I left like sediment—
quiet, heavy,
having learned the language
of sinking.
You called it love,
but I was always the chalk outline
beneath your ego’s bootprint,
the echo that apologised
for being stepped on.
You didn’t raise your voice—
you lowered the ceiling.
I lived crouched in rooms
where sunlight had to ask permission,
where even the mirrors learned
not to make eye contact.
Your cruelty was curated—
elegant, invisible,
the way a spider smiles
before building its next cathedral.
You broke things
without ever touching them:
my laugh,
my sleep,
my ability to trust a closed door.
Still, I stitched silence
into something that resembled survival.
Wore my hope like a housecoat
tattered but buttoned
because I had guests—
mostly shame, mostly ghosts,
all of them polite
and overstaying.
You told me I was too much.
Too sensitive. Too loud.
Too quiet. Too “imaginary.”
I kept shrinking
until I fit inside the parentheses
of your approval.
But there came a day
when the doorknob
was no longer a sermon,
when I folded the last apology
into an origami bird
and let it fly
through a window you forgot to lock.
I did not leave to punish you.
I left to remember
what my own name sounds like
when it isn't trembling.
Now,
I drink tea with both hands.
I sleep with the lights off.
I laugh like I’ve never had to earn it.
I collect metaphors like postcards
from the country I built
with no king, no cage,
just sky.
You were the war.
But I—
I am what crawled out of it,
mud-streaked,
miracle-mouthed,
and absolutely untamed.
Copyright ©
Aaliyah O'Neil
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