Personal Poem: What it Costs me to Stay 💔

What It Costs Me to Stay

I didn’t lose everything at once.

That would have been cleaner.

I lost things in pieces,

a moment here,

a promise there,

a child’s hand slipping out of mine

while adults discussed procedure.

Grief didn’t arrive screaming.

It learned my routines.

Sat beside me.

Ate quietly.

Some days it lives in my chest,

heavy and warm,

like a second heart

that only knows how to ache.

I have begged without kneeling,

cried without sound,

loved people so fiercely

it hollowed me out

and left me standing anyway.

There are photos I can’t look at

because I can feel them breathing.

There are smells that undo me,

soap, dust, warm clothes,

proof that memory has a body

and mine remembers too well.

I keep being told to let go

by people who never had to hold on

this hard

for this long

with this much at stake.

They don’t see the nights

where I curl around absence

like it might warm me,

or the mornings where breathing

feels like a decision

I have to make again.

I am tired in a way sleep won’t touch.

A bone deep, history soaked tired.

The kind that comes from loving

when walking away

would hurt less.

And sometimes I reach the end of myself

and ask the question that has no manners.

What’s the point

when the cost keeps rising

and the outcome keeps shrinking?

What’s the point of breathing

when every breath remembers

who isn’t here,

who should be,

who was taken by silence

instead of violence

because silence leaves no fingerprints?

What’s the point of surviving

when survival feels like unpaid labour

for a future that never arrives?

But here is the part no one taught me,

the part that doesn’t sound brave.

The point isn’t triumph.

It isn’t healing arcs or redemption speeches.

The point is defiance so quiet

it looks like exhaustion.

It is staying

when leaving would finally let the pain rest

and choosing, again,

to let myself rest instead.

It is refusing to let my story

be concluded by people

who never bothered to read it.

It is being proof

that something precious was here,

even if the world failed to protect it.

Some nights the point is nothing more than this.

I am still breathing,

and therefore

the harm has not won yet.

That has to be enough

for now.