Exit Wound

Never ready to talk,

always poised to vanish—

not the love we first conjured.

"Was it a dream?"

she murmurs into the blur,

half-asleep,

but flayed awake

by the shape of what’s no longer safe.

Both drained and hyperaware—

never quite waking,

always unraveling.

She folds inward,

chest a collapsed lung,

while unspoken things

circle like fish

too slow to surface,

too cruel to die.

Always sealed in,

never spit out.

What once ignited

now hisses with doubt.

He watched—

not cruel, just absent—

as what she swallowed

gnawed from the inside.

But rupture brought breath.

Stillness, finally.

A silence that did not punish.

She stepped out—

not whole,

but unmistakably hers.

No longer carved

to fit inside someone else’s forgetting.