I broke my rib to complete you….. split bone and spirit just to prove that I could love you past the places you tried to hide from even yourself. But in doing so, I left my heart exposed…. a tender altar for demons that were never even mine. Tell me, what’s the point of success if by the time I taste it, my mind is pulp. Overripe from overthinking, soft from too much self-sacrifice? What good is the prize if I lose the vessel that holds it? If my spirit becomes a tattered flag on a battlefield I never even enlisted for? I carry the ghosts of kindred men, their broken spirits baptized in the waters of my body. No wonder I feel fractured. No wonder I feel more haunted house than home. I kept giving love CPR long after it had flatlined. My hope was stretched in so many directions it forgot where I lived. I kept thinking, “One more try won’t kill me,” like the stale smell in damp places that lingers long after you throw the windows open. Their energy clung to me like shadows on wallpaper. Visible in the daylight but never there on the nights I needed them most, when the sky caved in and the sun was setting in my soul. But I broke. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just a quiet disintegration. The kind that happens when you realize you’ve become the burial ground for people who only ever came to die in you. No more. No more soil. No more graves. No more carving room in my ribcage for men who were only ever ghosts. If my soul could crawl from this flesh, it would strip me clean, hand-wash every wound on the clothesline of memory, wring out the pain, let the sun bleach it honest. And in the meantime, it would become a woman unburdened, a cathedral of her own design, bare and holy. Not craving love, but becoming it. Now I wait for love to grow in me again. From clean earth. From my own seed.                                                                                                                                     From a sun that rises for me, not because of them.