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Still Breathing
I have replayed that moment so many times,
While I breathe, while on the road, even in my sleep,
That even my mind has begun to hurt,
And I can no longer trust my own memories.
It began inside a narrow, suffocating room,
Where the air itself seemed afraid to move.
Your face changed behind the shadows,
And suddenly, the person I loved felt unfamiliar to me.
The night grew heavy and intensely strange,
As though even the walls had turned their backs on me.
There was laughter and there were screams,
Sounds that still return when the world is asleep.
I remember your anger filling every corner,
Your hands becoming something I could not recognize.
And then there was the moment you held a knife,
Every second afterward seemed to break apart.
I escaped. I ran with an exhausted spirit,
And found myself sitting alone on a bus.
I remember the glass window, clouded with mist
And streaked with scattered neon lights,
My reflection appearing and disappearing beneath it,
As though even I could no longer see who I was.
Somewhere beyond that blurred image,
I was trying to understand how love had brought me here.
I have wondered since then what truly happened,
Which details belong to memory and which belong to my pain.
Perhaps the mind protects us by changing the story
When the truth is too painful to carry all at once.
But some things do not change, no matter how they blur:
The fear, the silence, the person I was before that night.
And so I replay that moment again and again,
Searching for the exact point where love disappeared,
Searching for the moment I should have known
That tenderness could turn into something cruel.
But each time I return, the darkness rearranges itself,
And I come back with fewer answers than before.
Still, I remember enough.
Enough to know that what happened hurt.
Enough to know that fear
Should never have been mistaken for love.
Enough to know that I left that night with something broken,
But also with a part of me still breathing,
Still moving through the rain,
And not yet convinced to stop looking toward the light.
