a love story, post-mortem
to be replaced as if you were nothing is to die
By Mallory RosePublished 5 months ago • 2 min read
- hold him as tightly as he holds you as if letting go would extinguish stars and rewrite constellations and make the world go dark
- wrap around him like vine and ivy, even as he rips out your petals—he loves me, he loves me not—and digs up your roots
- he'll become a stranger overnight, one that exists only to lie and cheat, to maim you and brutalize you and destroy you
- but keep holding on, a cruel game of tug of war, muscles screaming and rope ripping skin off calloused palms
- send texts, paragraph after paragraph, begging for explanation, for closure, for respect or kindness or humanity
- get cold, heartless, one-word replies from an interloper wearing the skin of the man who once told you that you were the sun
- unwrap the lies of unconditional forever that he spent endless nights braiding into your hair and painting on your skin
- stop eating when food tastes like the cremated remains of the person you were before when you were one heart in two bodies
- his family—your family for eight years—they'll leave too without a goodbye, proving you're just crumpled garbage, a soggy cigarette butt in a gutter
- pluck clumps of tangled hair out of shower drains as your chapped lips bleed and your brittle bones crumble to dust
- realize too late that you're becoming shadow and smoke and try to grasp those missing tendrils of your soul as fiercely as you once held him
- you almost make it, broken glass gathered in bloody palms, when you see that picture of him with the girl, the one who faked friendship to cover jealousy
- get swept away, spin-cycling in
- a violent wave of pain and betrayal,
- smashed against jagged cliffs,
- eroding and melting and drowning
- in polluted, oil slick waters
- let the seaweed tangle
- around your legs
- and pull you deep,
- like the vine you used to be
- when you grew only around him
- like a twisted baptism,
- the water will cleanse you,
- stitching split skin with barbed wire,
- erasing memories and identity and
- the stamp of him embossed on your soul,
- and finally—finally—you let go
- who are you?
- where are you?
- what are you?
- nothing.
About the Creator
Mallory Rose
Writing to create, to grow, to confront, to become, to heal.
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Violence Begets
"Any last words, cowboy?" "None you'd understand, sodbuster." "Funny. That's Marshall Sodbuster to you. But I meant some last nugget that would help us in the adjudication of the myriad offenses counted against you and your gang. I wasn't asking for penitence."
By Adam Diehl4 days ago in Fiction
Comments (2)
Wooohooooo congratulations on your win! 🎉💖🎊🎉💖🎊
The subtitle for this piece was telling... I feel like I was reading the slow demise of a person so hurt and lost after love that it broke them. Such a sad and heartbreaking poem. Definitely deserving of placing in the Challenge so well done!