surrender

You left your sweater on the chair again, the one that smells like loose change and rain-soaked bus seats.

It’s 1:42 a.m. and I’m watching the light of my phone rinse the room while your name rings and goes quiet.

The kettle hisses, never boiling; the gas clicks, clicks, clicks, like a tongue deciding whether to forgive.

We said we wouldn’t do this tonight. We are doing this tonight.

I hear your keys in the hall before you decide to turn them. You time your entrances like needle drops.

The door opens the way a wound does: reluctantly, but it knows me. You say nothing. Neither do I.

We orbit the kitchen, two magnets refusing to admit they are only iron.

You check the cup I left for you, lipstick bruise on the porcelain rim, a sorry I didn’t say aloud.

You drink anyway. We both always drink anyway.

You tell me about a stranger who laughed at your joke in line for cigarettes.

I fold the receipt into a swan and set it on the counter between us. We watch it drown in the ring of a spilled glass.

You call me possessive. I call you careless. We’re both right, which is worse than either of us winning.

You lean on the fridge until the light inside flickers, bulb loose or wire afraid.

We keep the talk on low heat, so it never cooks, only steams and blurs the windows.

Later, our voices enter the bedroom ahead of us like uninvited guests.

The wall you punched last month still remembers your hand; I hung a calendar over it like forgiveness.

A calendar is the prettiest liar, then again, so am I when I promise you I’ll stop keeping score.

We undress in a hurry that looks like love and tastes like a dare. No details; we were there.

After, your breathing is a metronome I tune myself to. I fall asleep on the offbeats.

Morning makes the brutality polite. I cut fruit that has gone soft under the skin,

reducing sweetness to a theory. You scroll the news, pretend the world is the worst thing happening.

Before you leave, you straighten a picture frame I tilted on purpose.

I watch you not notice. That’s my pettiness grazing your ankle like a cat.

We both step over it and call that growth.

At school I feel you in my molars, a low ache that never breaks the gum line.

I rehearse kindness on the mouth of a coffee lid and fail.

I want to text I’m sorry / come home / ruin me / don’t you dare.

Instead I send: pick up batteries for the smoke alarm.

We took the old ones out last night when it kept screaming. We preferred the quiet to the warning.

By noon I’m imagining you at your desk, counting your lies to me the way I count mine to you.

You look best when you’re almost crying. I would never say that out loud, except now I just did.

I’m the kind of person who spoils fruit and secrets. You’re the kind who eats them anyway.

We are not good people. We are exact.

I don’t want to fix us. That’s the cleanest sentence I own.

I want the part of you that still believes I’m good, because that part is the softest bed.

I ration my tenderness like morphine and watch you beg for smaller and smaller doses.

You manage your rage like an heirloom. You polish it. You bequeath it to me, nightly.

Our economies are efficient. Nothing is wasted. Especially not hurt.

Remember the first week? You said my laugh sounded like glass in a pocket.

We ate pretzels on the stoop and made the pigeons jealous with how much attention we gave each other.

I used to love you like a new apartment, echoing, promise-thin, every sound a future.

Now I love you like the outlet behind the dresser: hot, a little loose,

a place we both pretend we’ll fix but never pull the furniture far enough to touch.

I catalog the ways I make you small. I put the prettiest ones on high shelves.

I speak softly and edit the knives out of my sentences, then store them in the silverware tray of my tone.

You wear your meanness like heavy jewellery, only for special occasions, then suddenly for breakfast.

I tell friends we’re “working on communication.” That’s true.

We communicate like night fishermen: one weak lantern and a habit of hooking what screams.

When you cry, I kiss the salt off your face as if I made it. Sometimes I did.

When I cry, you hold my head very still, like a camera trying to catch a confession.

The picture never turns out. We keep it anyway.

I apologise by organising your drawers. You forgive me by laughing at a story

you know I’ve told to make you into a hero, which makes me into a citizen of your empire again.

Tonight, when you’re late, I sit on the floor and alphabetise our arguments:

abandonment, blame, control, disappearing, escalation… I stop at jealousy. It deserves its own shelf.

By L I’m hungry. By M I miss you. By N I’m sure you’re doing it on purpose.

By O I am doing it on purpose too. By P I remember we never made it to peace,

just paused the war to sing. We are loud. The neighbours think we’re alive. They’re not wrong.

You text: be there in ten. I don’t believe you. I light the stove and watch

the flame harden into a ring. I imagine stepping into it, only with my mind,

calm down. I’m not dramatic; I’m precise. I know the difference between threat and weather.

I practice my face in the black of the microwave door: forgiving, then not.

You prefer the second one. It gives you something to argue with. It gives me something to be.

When you arrive, you bring a loaf of bread and a bruise you won’t explain.

I do the math and come up with an answer I hate but won’t contest.

We eat with our hands like thieves and call it rustic.

You say, I hate how much I need you. I say, I hate that you said it first.

We toast to honesty with our worst cups. They shatter beautifully in the sink.

There are good hours, and that’s the strangest cruelty.

We fold laundry while a song we used to love pretends to be new.

Our laughter stitches a temporary balcony onto the evening and we stand there

as if the view were ours, as if the street wouldn’t reclaim it by morning.

I touch the back of your neck, that electric prayer. You answer with your shoulder: stay.

I learned this shape of wanting from somewhere I can’t name. Maybe the house I grew up in

with doors that closed like decisions. Maybe the night I discovered silence has a taste.

Maybe I was born carrying a glass of milk and a hammer and have been choosing ever since.

You, with your careful cruelty, your talent for returning just when I decide I’m done,

were made for me the way a lock is made for a thief. The door keeps pretending it isn’t participating.

By the time we make it to the couch, we’ve already forgiven tomorrow’s crimes.

We watch a documentary about deep-sea vents; the creatures down there live on poison and no one blames them.

You put your feet under my thigh and call it comfort, but we both know it’s a shackle.

I like the weight. You like that I like the weight. This is how we read each other bedtime stories.

The hero dies. The villain kneels. The kingdom claps. Curtains. Again.

I want to tell you something that isn’t poetry: When you leave, I don’t breathe right.

When you stay, I don’t breathe right. I have built an apartment

out of not breathing right and painted it your favourite color.

I’ve installed a window that only opens onto your face at 3:17 a.m.,

when you are a confession I can hold without getting blood on my shirt.

Some nights I try to speak to you in plain text:

I lied when I said I was trying. I’m trying to keep you, not heal us.

I measure the doses of truth so you never get better enough to go.

I kicked the alarm under the sink because it wouldn’t shut up about smoke.

You nod like a priest who has heard worse, which is almost mercy.

Other nights, the language ferments. You call me the architect of small disasters.

I call you the storm that waits for scaffolding. Fine, we’ve built a city of it.

The streets flood predictably. The traffic lights blink apology.

We hold hands in the crosswalk while the water is up to our knees and pretend it’s a baptism.

We come out the other side just as dirty, but now we’re wet and the clothes will cling for hours.

Do you remember when we tried to break up out loud?

We sat on separate benches like kids in a court-mandated play and spoke our lines.

I said: This is killing me. You said: Then die or stay.

A pigeon watched, unimpressed, then strutted off with a wrapper like it owned something bright.

We laughed until the benches forgave us and came home to make a liar of the afternoon.

I am not the narrator who learns the lesson. I am the lesson that keeps repeating the class.

You are not the monster. You’re the mirror with teeth. I keep brushing my hair in you anyway.

We don’t heal; we refine. We don’t quit; we sharpen. These are virtues somewhere, just not here.

If we touched the good world long enough it might adopt us, but we keep tugging each other back

to the hallway of locked doors because we like the sound our knuckles make when we knock.

Now the edges soften; language unbuttons.

The apartment leans toward us like a witness convinced by our story.

Our names smudge. We become pronouns with knives tucked in the vowels.

In the ceiling, a small crack traces our initials without learning to spell them.

Time tilts its head and pretends not to stare.

You are the hunger I feed to stay hungry.

I am the hand that turns off the lamp to prove we glow.

We are the lit match cupped in a stormless room because fire is prettier when it’s unnecessary.

No, forget fire. That’s too easy. We are iron filings dreaming of a magnet,

shivering into patterns that explain nothing except the ache of belonging.

We are the peach we left behind the fridge, perfect until it isn’t,

then royal, then ruin, then a sweet kind of violence you can smell before you see.

We are the word almost that I tuck under my tongue when I kiss you

so you’ll taste the promise and not the math.

We are the corridor in the museum no one visits, humming with alarms politely asleep.

I was born with this tilt toward damage. You were born with a map of my weak lights.

You press two fingers here and I go quiet. I press there and you become a house again.

This is choreography; this is crime; this is communion with the wrong god who answers anyway.

We kneel. We rise. We trade teeth marks for vows. We call that culture. It is ours.

Listen,

I know. I know the exit sign by heart. I know the door opens.

I know the street is kind and the night bus runs and the driver has seen worse.

I know my friends would clap like a flock if I arrived alone and breathing right.

I know it the way I know the taste of keys. I still come home to you.

So take this letter I will never send and fold it into the shape of a house.

Set it beside the calendar, over the wound in the wall, and tell me we’re doing better.

I’ll nod. You’ll believe me. The kettle will try again. The gas will click its teeth.

When you say you hate how much you love me, I will say I hate that I love you too.

And this time we’ll both mean it, and it still won’t help.

Come lie down. I’ll be the silence. You be the weight.

We’ll not breathe right together until the window blurs and the city forgets our names.

In the morning we’ll straighten the frame, forgive the alarm, buy new peaches,

and swear, hands on wet hearts, to be gentler, which is only a different way to say

we will not leave.

I won’t pretend there’s a cure for what made us.

If there is, it lives in a language we refuse to pronounce.

So let’s be honest in the only tongue we share:

you are killing me soft and I am letting you, softer,

and somewhere between us a small thing keeps living because we keep refusing to save it.

Call it love if it helps you sleep.

Call it nature if it helps me.

Either way, darling,

leave the sweater.

You’ll need it when you come back.