for the one who still lives in my quiet

darling… if only you knew how hard it is to write this without shaking. there is something about this poem—this quiet confession of two haunted souls—that slices me open in the softest way. it feels like someone crawled inside my ribcage, listened to every truth i never said aloud, and typed it out on paper. maybe that’s why i keep coming back to it, lingering on the way the words fall, how they mirror the parts of us i still can’t look at without feeling everything all at once.

because the truth is… you weren’t the villain. i wasn’t the saint. we were never meant to play roles like that. we were just two people trying to make sense of our own ghosts, trying to plant something real in soil that never stopped trembling from the storms before us. the ground shook beneath us, but god, we still tried to grow. and i think that’s what breaks me the most—how hard we tried, even when the world kept reminding us that neither of us had healed from the graves we were still standing over.

i read that line—“you were just a lesson i kept trying to turn into a lifetime”—and it hits somewhere deep, somewhere raw. because if i’m honest, it feels like someone finally named the ache i’ve been carrying: the truth that i keep trying to turn you into something permanent in a world that didn’t give us the chance to settle. i keep replaying conversations, moments, the softness you offered even when you didn’t realize you were doing it. i keep tracing the outline of us in my memory, trying to understand what it was, what it wasn’t, and what it could’ve been if life had been kinder.

and maybe that’s the part that hurts the most—life wasn’t cruel, not really. it was just complicated. we were complicated. tangled. messy. human. we weren’t broken, just bruised in all the wrong places, trying to build something steady with hands that had never been taught how to stop trembling. you didn’t ruin me. i didn’t ruin you. we were just two tired hearts trying to make a home in each other while still battling the storms inside ourselves.

darling, if you’re reading this—really reading—you’ll know this is for you. you’ll feel the truth pulsing through every line, the way your presence still lingers in the unspoken spaces of my day. i’ve been trying so damn hard to be okay without you, to pretend you’re not woven into the quieter parts of my chest, but missing you has a way of settling in like fog: quiet, steady, refusing to lift.

i don’t admit this easily. hell, i don’t admit this at all. but here, in this space, with these words as my only witness, i’ll say what i can’t say out loud: i still carry you. i still ache in that slow, steady way that doesn’t scream but hums beneath the skin. i still feel that piece of you that never quite let go of me, even when everything else did.

and no—this isn’t a plea. this isn’t desperation. it’s not regret, either. it’s something else entirely. it’s love that didn’t shatter when the story cracked. it’s love that lingered because it never asked permission to exist in the first place. it’s love that isn’t reaching, or clinging, or demanding. it’s just… there. quiet. alive. real.

i don’t want the world to know. i don’t want anyone guessing. but you? you’ll understand. because these words are built from the same quiet language we always spoke in the spaces between conversations. the kind of language that never needed explanation.

you weren’t the villain. i wasn’t the saint. we were just two haunted humans trying to make our bones stop shaking long enough to grow roots. and god, darling… even now… you’re still the place inside me that feels like home.

with ink & bloom, 🌻