I lived by your surrender and my ruin. You were my undoing. My cage. You were all I wanted. All I thought I needed. I thought this was love. What followed became a brutal transformation born in the aftermath of toxic love, the kind of heartbreak that left no part of me unchanged. Despite all the books, I understood gravity when your hand met mine. Despite all the lessons on loyalty, I understood when I painted you with a halo.
I called names in the dark; they were all sweet nicknames for you. You were the king of my senses- a tongue remembering how to spell your name. Eyes used to tracing your silhouette. Ears that memorized your voice and skin burning for your touch. All I ever needed was your breath to awaken me. I called you my twin flame, my divine partner, an answer to my prayers sent from hell. You were a lifeline I didn’t know I was holding on to. A string I never thought I would lose.
Your shortcomings- mere inspiration for my excuses.
You were the most beautiful star I had set my eyes on. Even having the privilege of witnessing your existence was a reason to believe God loved me.
When Toxic Love Feels Like Destiny
There is a dangerous seduction in retrospective meaning. Because a relationship changes us profoundly, we may begin to imagine that it was therefore destined, sacred, or necessary. I do not believe those things are the same. Harm can alter a life without becoming holy because it hurt us. Transformation can emerge after a damaging love without retroactively consecrating the damage.
Insanity, fragments, hellfire, my sweet moonlight. Although fleeting, we burned like a comet. The only time we looked our best together. I saw the shadow of you, your shape, your anger, your absence. I cuddled to sleep there, your darkness the safest place I knew. Now you’re an echo of all my desires.
I wanted answers, and you gave me distance.
I wanted you, but you gave me fragments.
Haunting me.
A sin.
My purgatory made of your lies.
An eternal doom.
Silence. Obsession and Then the Void
A story that began with no prologue and ended in torn pages. Fluttering in the wind. Smoldering at the blackened tips. The emptiness of where you should have been. The void of your place in my life, the moment your steps faltered and stopped, refusing to come with me any further. It aches like vodka burning through my bloodstream.
So here I kneel in the pool of your blood. Smoking a cigar of memories. Blowing wishes and unfulfilled wants out into the universe. Freeing them from the cage of my heart. A sad smirk graced the corner of my lips…my lips…the lips that ached for your fingertips, a taste of you. I gulp it all down before this wishful scenario settles in my brain again. I latch onto the fantasy for one moment longer, letting it ruin me again. Silk on my skin, candlelight dancing on my naked chest, making shadows of my contours go ecstatic. These tiny pockets of heaven in the dark recesses of my neck, I had put your name on them all.
My body thrums with the old conviction that only you could have satiated it. You, the only one I would have allowed to. The ache I feel the most. You are the dream unfulfilled. Never to be mine. You were never mine. But to the devil I wish you were.
The cigar smoke thins, dancing around an invisible pole in a dress of white fire. She looks ethereal…we could have brought heaven down to earth.
You and I: The Best Short-Lived Paradox to Ever Exist
I close my eyes and wonder what your touch could feel like. It makes me bend my back. Run my fingers along the length of my arms. My neck rotates, and my hair curtains to hide my eyes filled with need and lust. I liked you rough and crass, but watching the imagined version of you lie dead at my feet makes me wonder what being loved should actually have felt like. I loved you so hard I mistook you for God.
But it is a brutal death to fall from grace.
Nursing your loss, licking the scratches from battles I never wanted to win. This war within me is tearing at the seams, but it’s just too late. A single tear falls down the length of my face. Like how your fingers traced my shape, it wipes away your touch and takes it away with its salty tide. A tide that will wash me over, ruin me.
The Sacred Transformation Hidden Inside Heartbreak
By the time I emerge from it, I may not be colder. I hope I am clearer. Clearer about what longing can disguise, about the difference between intensity and intimacy. Clearer about what I will no longer call love simply because it makes me ache.
I won. This is the biggest loss I’ve ever had.
The transformation belongs to me. It is not proof that the relationship was sent to transform me. I can honor what I learned without owing gratitude to what harmed me.
Ruin from My Muse or My Divine Rage?
Perhaps divine rage, if I use the phrase at all, is not the desire to destroy the person who wounded me. It is the part of me that finally refuses to keep making an altar of what diminished me.
Rage can reveal a violated boundary. It can also become cruel, obsessive, or indiscriminate. I do not need to worship it any more than I needed to worship him. I only need to hear what it is trying to protect.
Write to Your Muse
You have survived something. Not cleanly. Not without cost. But you are here. And here is where the writing begins.
Set the Ritual
This one is not gentle. Don’t light the candle for softness tonight. Light it for the ceremony. For the gravity of what happened and what it cost and what it made of you.
Write in two parts.
First, begin: “Dear Muse, I gave the trigger to someone else. And what happened was…”
Don’t spare yourself or them. Write it as it actually was, not as you have made it bearable in the telling.
Then, on a new page, begin:
“And the version of me that emerged from that ruin is…”
This second letter is not to your Muse. It is from her. Let her tell you what became possible after the wound: what you learned, recovered, refused, or reclaimed. Do not require yourself to believe the wound was necessary in order to honor what you built afterward.
A Closing Seal
“I won, and it is the biggest loss I’ve ever had.”
Sometimes the only words that fit are the ones already written. The ruin was real. So is the shore you washed up on. You do not have to call the storm sacred to recognize that you survived the sea.
Deepen Your Connection To The House
If this relationship changed the shape of who you thought you were, do not begin by asking whether it was destined. Begin by asking what actually changed. Take the Liminal Self-Audit.
Continue through The Muse Era.