Carved

It aches so deeply because your words found a place inside me

I had long buried beneath layers of sunlight and survival.

Beneath years of mending wounds I never asked to carry.

You said:

"I hate you for breaking my heart. I never loved you, and I guess I was pretending. You look bad on paper and have a terrible past."

And just like that—

you sliced through the fabric of my being,

struck the part of me I thought was untouchable.

A part I kept safe, buried under resilience.

In a single moment, you unraveled years of quiet, sacred rebuilding.

Logically?

I could give you the map of this whole thing.

I study this. I teach this. I live this.

I could say it was projection,

that pain seeks company,

that when I left, I left your heart shattered

and this was your retaliation.

Maybe I deserved it, part of me whispers,

because I said I would stay—and didn’t.

But this pain doesn’t live in logic.

It’s primal.

It pulses in the places my childhood fears still echo.

It feeds off confirmation bias and reinforces a story

I never asked to star in:

That I am unloveable.

That I am too much,

and still, somehow—

not enough.

But I’m neither.

I’m not too much. I’m not lacking.

I’m a woman with a past, yes—

one filled with broken glass and bad choices,

but never terrible.

Because that past?

It carved me.

Shaped me into someone who shows up,

who still chooses softness,

who gives and loves without tallying the cost.

Without that fire,

there would be no woman for you to have fallen in love with.

Without that pain,

I’d be a shell—

polished, maybe, but hollow.

So I sit with your words.

I hold them like hot stones in my palm.

And then I exhale.

I send you love.

I forgive the wound you left in your own drowning.

I wish healing for the version of you

that forgot who he was when he needed himself most.

Because those mistakes I made—

they were not the fullness of me.

And those words you gave me as we fell apart—

they were not the truth of you.