I live,
but it is not life.
A corpse cradles your love,
too cold to feel,
too empty to remember
the warmth of a touch
that never reached me.

Your love is a wound,
a thing I carve into my chest,
a knife I hold with trembling hands,
cutting deeper
with every breath.
There is no blood,
only a slow seep of darkness
that fills me,
blackening my veins,
eclipsing what’s left of light.

I wear your love like a shroud,
its fabric too thin to protect,
too heavy to carry,
dragging me deeper into the earth
where the air suffocates
and the ground weeps with regret.
Every step I take
sinks further
into the weight of you,
your absence that clings like rot,
a scent too putrid to escape,
too constant to ignore.

I hold your love,
but it is not love,
it is a thorn lodged in my ribs,
the poison seeping through my skin,
numbing,
filling me with a hunger
too dark to feed.

The silence between us is a scream,
a scream that never cracks the air,
but claws at the inside of my skull,
twisting my thoughts into ghosts,
my words into ashes
that fall before they reach the ground.

I live in the ruins of you,
a ruin that was never built to stand,
its foundation cracked with promises
too broken to rebuild.
And still,
I stand in the rubble,
a monument to your absence,
to a love that was never real,
a love that only took
and never gave.

I carry your pain,
but it is not pain,
it is a hollow weight,
a deep, infinite hole
where my heart should be,
a chasm that screams your name
with no voice to echo.

Still, I live,
but I do not.
I am a shadow of what was,
a flicker of what could never be,
and the air around me thickens,
filling with the stench of a love
that was never mine to begin with.