Once,

I mistook intensity for devotion and thought passion was the fire that burned instead of the warmth that stayed.

I called the tightening of my world

care.

I saw him as strong, powerful—

steady hands, confident voice,

a man who knew what he wanted

and told me who I should be.

I didn’t notice how my plate grew smaller,

how my phone became a monitored space,

how music softened to whatever wouldn’t offend him,

how friendships faded quietly,

like lights dimmed one by one.

I learned how to shrink without being asked.

I learned how to explain bruises as accidents,

words as jokes,

fear as loyalty.

I thought love meant endurance.

I thought love meant staying

even when fingerprints lingered

where affection never should.

And when I left,

I left only in body at first.

My mind stayed trapped

in the echoes of his voice,

in dreams where I was chased,

in flinches that arrived uninvited.

I mistook distance for freedom

until I learned

freedom has a heartbeat

and it lives inside the chest.

Now,

I see him differently.

Not as a monster—

but as a man carrying

unhealed fractures he never learned to name.

A boy who confused control with safety

because no one taught him

what love looks like without fear.

I see the lineage of brokenness,

the inheritance of silence,

the way pain teaches people

to hold too tightly.

And because I have healed,

I do not hate him.

I wish him growth

that does not include me.

I wish him mirrors

that cannot lie.

I wish him the courage

to face himself

without borrowing power from another soul.

But I do not open the door.

Love does not require access.

Compassion does not mean return.

Forgiveness does not mean forgetting

what it took to survive.

The relationship I am in now

is with myself.

She eats without permission.

She speaks without rehearsing.

She rests without guilt.

She trusts slowly

and chooses carefully.

She no longer mistakes chaos for chemistry

or control for commitment.

She understands now

that the unknown was never more dangerous

than staying where she was disappearing.

He no longer defines me.

His words have no jurisdiction here.

His reach ends at the boundary

I learned to protect.

What remains

is the lesson—

not as a scar,

but as wisdom.

Because without that darkness,

I would not recognize light so clearly.

Without that loss of self,

I would not know how fiercely

I can belong to me.

We are nothing now

but a chapter

closed gently,

without resentment.

He was a teacher,

not a destination.

And I am walking forward—

whole,

awake,

and free.

Reflection

Healing does not always arrive as anger or distance.

Sometimes it arrives as clarity—

the kind that allows you to release someone

without carrying them with you.

Closing Quote

“I did not lose myself—I found the courage to return.”

Always,

CM