A Thousand Scars Later

I loved her when forgetting was fashionable

and memory still wore perfume.

When silence felt like safety,

and warmth arrived dressed as permanence.

But that was before the bruises bloomed quietly —

before the mirror stopped lying.

That was a thousand scars ago.

And I am a thousand scars later.

She stayed until the fire learned restraint,

until my tenderness stiffened into myth.

She called me intense,

but traced my fractures like scripture.

I thanked her without blinking.

We mistake stillness for strength.

We always do.

A thousand scars later.

My mother demanded obedience.

My father preserved silence.

I gave them both.

What they buried wasn’t a boy —

but the statutory warning.

Now when I speak,

the echo arrives before the voice.

That’s how absence answers

a thousand scars later.

I have loved like a secret held in the mouth.

Been loved like a gamble with poor odds.

They saw potential.

I sought exits.

We were not speaking the same prayer.

But we knelt beside it anyway.

Regret always finds the altar

a thousand scars later.

They said pain would soften in time.

But time is just a curtain drawn slowly

over a room you never left.

The dust forgives nothing.

The silence rewrites everything.

And I am made of both.

A thousand scars later.

There was once a woman who offered gentleness.

I told her I was not shaped for light.

She stayed, briefly —

the way rain sometimes loiters around before departing.

She left a warmth that refused to dry.

A tenderness that blistered.

I loved her quietly

and left her in ruins.

A thousand scars later.

I do not write to heal.

I write to remember without permission.

To unbury what refused to stay dead.

There are names I no longer speak,

only spell in pain.

There are days I fold into paper birds

and flutter into the wind

just to see if they return.

None ever have.

A thousand scars later.

I’ve grown fluent in leaving.

Not from cowardice,

but from muscle memory.

I know how to pack silence into a suitcase.

How to fold memory without creasing longing.

How to smile

until it becomes a scar.

These are not talents.

They are inheritances.

A thousand scars later.

There are songs I don’t hum.

Rooms I don’t enter.

Faces I remember by their silences.

I forgive, but never forget.

Not because I lack mercy —

but because I’ve learned

some doors are meant to remain haunted.

A thousand scars later.

Some nights, I speak to the shadow beside me.

It nods.

It knows.

Some nights, I speak to no one —

and that is the safest kind of honesty.

Some nights are louder than guilt.

Others, softer than her goodbye.

But all of them echo

a thousand scars later.

Yes — I am a thousand scars later.

Still flinching at kindness.

Still rehearsing joy like an unfamiliar dialect.

Still here,

unfixed,

unforgotten,

unforgiving.

A thousand scars later.

And if I vanish tonight,

let no elegy be written.

Let no metaphor stand in for the body.

Let the poem remain unfinished,

as all truths are.

Let the silence speak last.

It always does.

A thousand scars later.