Score |
250
The Rot within
<p><br/></p><p>Something in me died the day you left.</p><p>Still, unmoving, dark.</p><p>A hole, insatiable, ever-expanding,</p><p>feeding on the life-giving energy of everything I was.</p><p>The sun within, dimmed.</p><p>Not extinguished.</p><p>Dimmed so I still wake,</p><p>still dress,</p><p>still answer when they call my name.</p><p><br/></p><p>A black hole where my heart used to be,</p><p>pulling inward joy, memory, appetite, colour.</p><p>The last laugh I remember having,</p><p>was the one you drew from me.</p><p>Now laughter feels like trespassing,</p><p>on a grave I haven't named yet.</p><p><br/></p><p><br/></p><p>It's been long.</p><p>People are starting to smell the rot.</p><p>The distance from society,</p><p>the way I leave rooms before I arrive in them,</p><p>the quivering arms and stuttering tongue,</p><p>that fumble at the simplest 'hello'</p><p><em>how are you?, how are you?, how are you?</em></p><p>Fine. Fine. Fine.</p><p><br/></p><p>A word I've worn so thin</p><p>you can see through it now.</p><p><br/></p><p><br/></p><p>Do you smell the rot?</p><p>Not the rot of flesh,</p><p>but of a self that stopped updating,</p><p>a version of me that crashed the night you left,</p><p>and no one noticed the blue screen.</p><p>Do you smell it?</p><p>The singed edges of unlived mornings,</p><p>the mildew of plans we made</p><p>that I still haven't had the heart to undo?</p><p><br/></p><p><br/></p><p>Oh, your disappointment.</p><p>I see it land before your words arrive.</p><p><em>You should be further along by now.</em></p><p><em>You should be healing.</em></p><p><em>You should be—</em></p><p><br/></p><p>I am on my knees.</p><p>Not in prayer.</p><p>Not in surrender.</p><p>Just on my knees,</p><p>because standing requires something,</p><p>I buried with you.</p><p><br/></p><p>They want me upright.</p><p>Tie straightened, shoes polished,</p><p>grief folded neatly into a pocket no one can see.</p><p>But grief is not a pocket.</p><p>It is the coat itself.</p><p>It is the skin beneath the coat.</p><p>It is the marrow beneath the skin.</p><p><br/></p><p>I force the smile.</p><p>It sits on my face</p><p>the way a wound wears a bandage,</p><p>covering, not healing.</p><p><br/></p><p>The burnout is not tiredness.</p><p>Tiredness yields to sleep.</p><p>This is the weariness of carrying</p><p>a corpse of mine while everyone watches</p><p>and calls it living.</p><p><br/></p><p>Something in me died the day you left.</p><p>And I am learning slowly,</p><p>on raw and bleeding knees,</p><p>that grief is not the end of love.</p><p><br/></p><p><em>It is love with nowhere left to go.</em></p><p><br/></p><p>A black hole? Yes.</p><p>But black holes were once stars.</p><p><br/></p><p><br/></p><p><em>And I was. God! I was a star.</em></p>
109
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