The Unraveling

I told you I was struggling that winter evening,

Voice cracking like thin ice over deep waters,

Showed you the fault lines running through my foundation,

The trembling hands I’d hidden in jacket pockets.

But instead of offering shelter from my storms,

You gathered my confessions like ammunition.

Your eyes lit up at each revealed weakness,

A predator sensing wounded prey.

Every vulnerability I trusted you with

Became a blade between my ribs,

Twisted with surgical precision

Until I could barely draw breath.

When panic clawed up my throat at midnight,

And sleep became a distant memory,

You watched me pace these hollow rooms

With something like satisfaction in your smile,

As if my unraveling was a performance

Staged solely for your entertainment.

I remember standing in our kitchen,

Gripping the counter until knuckles went white,

Trying to hold myself together with coffee and pride,

While you cataloged my failures like collecting butterflies,

Pinning each one carefully to display:

Too guarded, too broken, too much, yet never enough.

I wanted to be the oak tree in your garden,

Roots deep and branches strong enough to shelter.

I thought if I could just endure the lightning,

Weather enough storms without falling,

You might finally see my worth

In the rings of scars beneath my bark.

But you kept pruning away pieces of me,

Cutting through sinew and bone with careful words,

Until I couldn’t recognize the stranger

Staring back from bathroom mirrors at dawn,

A man reduced to scaffolding and shadows,

Everything solid stripped away.

Now I sit alone in Sunday silence,

Surrounded by the wreckage of what we were,

And somehow I’ve become the villain of this story,

The man who couldn’t love enough,

Who didn’t know the right words,

Who kept too many walls between his heart and healing.

You’ll tell them all about my distance,

How I never learned to shape my pain to poetry,

How my silence spoke of something darker.

They’ll nod and understand your suffering,

While I swallow back the truth like bitter medicine:

How masterfully you dismantled a man.

The world will embrace your narrative,

Paint me in colors of cold withdrawal,

Never seeing how your quiet violence

Taught me that vulnerability was weakness,

That love was just another name for losing,

And trust was the sharpest blade of all.

In the end, I am left with empty rooms

And the echo of everything I tried to say,

All the words that stuck like thorns

Behind my teeth, too dangerous to speak.

No one sees the wreckage left behind

When a man’s foundation finally breaks.