The Ruin of Memory

Then I realize what I said.
The words hung in the air like smoke that won’t clear,
like glass shattering in slow motion —
every fragment sharp enough to remember,
but too many to ever piece back together.

Then I was mad.
Not the kind of mad that burns quick and clean,
but the kind that roots itself in silence,
the kind that seeps into every heartbeat
and makes even love feel like a betrayal.

I carry childhood in me like a broken crystal,
its edges cutting when I reach for comfort.
The faces in old photographs blur when I stare too long —
I swear they whisper when the room is dark,
reminding me of all the doors I closed too early,
and all the ones that never opened at all.

Time is cruel like that.
It takes the sweetest afternoons
and stains them with questions I can’t scrub out.
It makes me walk the same streets twice,
once as the dreamer, once as the ghost.

And yet…
I can’t pretend I don’t miss the way anger felt honest,
how shouting made the silence disappear,
how love still tasted like hope
even when it was cracked with doubt.

Maybe what I said wasn’t wrong,
just raw.
Maybe what I lost wasn’t stolen,
just traded.
Maybe the only way forward
is to keep speaking,
even when the words fall apart in my hands.

Because beneath the ruin of memory,
beneath the rage that still stings,
there’s a flicker —
a fragile, impossible flicker —
that says I am still here,
still human,
still reaching for something
worth breaking for.

by Onnaya