Home

Coming back to a place that once felt like home now feels like stepping into a foreign world— a liminal space—one where the echoes of what we were linger, but nothing truly fits and everything feels like decay.

I lived in your house so long,

I forgot the contours of my own.

Returning now feels alien,

as if the walls once mine

have shifted,

their breath unfamiliar.

Did I truly exist here,

before you filled the empty spaces?

Now it’s just me—just me—

and the silence feels hollow,

a home that cannot hold me.

When I was in love,

I wasn’t just in love with you.

I was in love with the world—

its mornings, its evenings,

its every exhale brimming with wonder.

The trees seemed greener,

the sun warmer,

and every step was laced with possibility,

because somewhere, you existed.

You felt for me what I felt for you,

and in that symmetry, nothing else mattered.

It was always spring then.

Every day was a bloom,

a cascade of petals soft beneath our feet.

Now the seasons have turned,

and it’s winter—endlessly winter.

The trees stand barren,

the air bites cold,

and the world is skeletal.

The laughter has drained away,

leaving only silence,

so thick and heavy

it hums in the marrow of my bones.

Perhaps my love for you

was too tender,

too fragile.

It left a wound in my chest

that refuses to scar,

a soft, raw thing

that weeps at the slightest touch.

But what is this loyalty

if not madness?

Why does the memory of a love

I thought we shared

still keeps my heart soft,

while it hardened and froze yours?

You don’t understand,

and I can’t make you—

those blue lights,

how they twist the knife.

To you, they were joy,

a flicker of festive cheer.

But to me, they were shards of glass,

sharp and unforgiving.

Every time I see their glow,

my tears betray me,

a tide I cannot hold back.

This isn’t just grief,

it isn’t just longing.

It’s something darker, deeper—

a violation of the natural order,

a rupture in the way life should unfold.

What you did wasn’t heartbreak,

wasn’t something lovers must endure.

It wasn’t normal,

it wasn’t human.

And that,

more than your absence,

is what aches the most.

How does one accept the unacceptable?

How does one rebuild

from something that should never have fallen apart?

And yet, here I am—

trying to make sense

of the senseless.

This isn’t just something everyone endures—

what you did was a fracture in the fabric of what it means to be human.

It wasn’t heartbreak; it was a violation.

The weight you ask me to carry

isn’t something meant to be borne.

What you demand I accept

isn’t something natural to accept.

It gnaws at the edges of my soul,

a truth too jagged to swallow,

an ache too monstrous to name.

© 2024 Inaba Tarek