Between the Lines

Your words arrive broken,

delivered in halves,

as if truth were too heavy

for your tongue to bear.

Do you think I don’t notice?

That I won’t hear

the fractures,

the rehearsed pauses,

the way you smile

to seal the cracks shut?

I am not blind.

I live in the hollow

of your omissions,

choking on the dust

of everything unsaid.

You keep me tethered

a dog at your gate,

fed scraps and pieces,

expecting me to call it love.

But I am not your shadow,

not a mirror for your

half-built stories.

I will not keep

biting my tongue

to make room for your silence.

One day,

your fragments will cut you open,

and I will not be there

to bleed for you.

If the Silence Were Yours

What if I gave you

the same hunger you fed me.

let you starve

on half-answers,

watch you beg

for the pieces I refused to give?

What if I smiled

while keeping the truth

locked in my throat,

let you press your ear

to my silence

and call it love?

Would you still stand steady,

pretending scraps are enough?

Or would the weight of not-knowing

splinter you,

the way it splintered me?

You would learn then

how shadows bruise.

How omission is its own kind of blade.

How trust dies not in fire

but in quiet,

careful

withholding.

And maybe then

you would finally understand

that love cannot breathe

through half-closed lips,

that even the gentlest lies

leave scars

that never stop whispering.

Tell me....

would you survive it?

if I fed you the same poison?

If I carved my truths in half

and left you to choke

on the missing pieces?

Would you smile then,

still so certain,

while I locked the rest away

behind my teeth?

You’d hate it.

You’d claw at the silence,

demand answers

I never gave.

You’d call it cruelty,

you’d call it betrayal

but you’d never call it love.

And yet,

that is what you offered me.

Shadows,

fractures,

a mouth that could never

speak whole.