Between Bruises & Blooms

The bruises faded.

Purple fingerprints
softened into yellow,
then disappeared
like my skin was trying
to erase the evidence
before I was ready
to admit
what happened there.

For a while,
I mistook fading
for healing.

I watched each mark disappear
and thought maybe
I was disappearing
from him too.

Maybe pain had an expiration date.

Maybe my body
would eventually forget
the hands
that taught it fear.

It didn’t.

My skin forgot.

My body remembered.

It remembered the knives.

The screaming.

The way rage could fill a room
before a single word
was spoken.

The way I learned
to measure danger
by footsteps,
by slammed doors,
by the smallest shift
in someone’s voice.

I learned the geography
of survival.

Which rooms had exits.

How close I was
to the door.

How quickly
I could make myself smaller.

How softly
I needed to breathe
when anger entered the room.

Some bruises
never show up
in photographs.

They become flinching.

Locked doors.

Checking behind you
even when no one is there.

They become apologies
already forming
on your tongue
before anyone
has accused you
of anything.

They become the way
your shoulders tense
when someone raises
their voice.

The way kindness
can feel suspicious.

The way love
sometimes arrives
and you still wait
for it to turn cruel.

He left bruises
on more than my skin.

He left them
in the way
I learned
to survive love.

In the parts of me
that confuse silence
with safety.

In the instinct
to brace
before being touched.

In the strange guilt
of being treated gently
after spending so long
believing gentleness
was something
I had to earn.

But he didn’t
get to keep me there.

That is the part
he never planned for.

The bruises faded.

The fear took longer.

Some days,
it still lives
beneath my ribs
like an old storm
that remembers
where I used to hide.

But I am learning
that a raised voice
doesn’t always mean danger.

That hands
can reach for me
without hurting me.

That love
does not require
survival.

And slowly,
my body is learning
something new.

I am still here.

Still healing.

Still teaching my bones
that the war is over.

Still planting flowers
in places
that once only knew
how to bruise.

Still blooming
from every place
he tried to leave
black and blue.