letters from the bruise 

i wrote you letters,
and poems—
each time you hurt me.
each ache bled ink,
each silence became a stanza.

what began as healing
turned into history.
now, the pain i tried to hide
can sit on a shelf,
bound in a spine,
called a book.

strange, isn’t it?
how something so heavy
can become art?
how heartbreak can dress itself
in metaphors,
how wounds can rhyme
when nothing else did?

i wrote more words
when you shattered me
than when you said you loved me.
more verses bloomed from the cracks
than from your comfort.

maybe that says enough—
about the love you gave
and the love i received.

to you,
it was something—
a moment,
a flicker,
a passing thing.

to me,
it was everything—
a universe,
a language,
a life i built
from the dust of your absence.

to you,
it was the bare minimum.
to me,
it was a cathedral i knelt in,
a fire i fed
with everything i had.

maybe that’s the tragedy—
that i turned pain into poetry,
while you turned love into convenience.

but isn’t that what art is?
the echo of what we were never given,
the shape of what was missing,
the beauty pulled from the wreckage?

so now they’ll read
the chapters of my heartbreak,
and maybe they’ll wonder—
not about you,
but about how grief
can grow petals,
how silence can sing,
how even bruises
can leave behind something
worth holding.

and maybe that’s the only closure i’ll get—
not in your apology,
but in the irony:

you gave me pain—
i gave the world poetry.