Between Bruises & Blooms

You put it in a song
like it was already decided.

Work hard.
Come home.
Sit beside me
with something cold
between our hands

and watch the kids grow old.

Such an ordinary dream.

That is what kills me.

You didn’t promise
castles.

You didn’t give me
some impossible forever
made of diamonds
and sunsets
and bullshit movie endings.

You gave me
a couch.

A drink.

Tired bones
after long days.

Children getting taller
while we somehow
got older too.

Birthdays.

School pictures.

Shoes abandoned
by the door.

Teenage attitudes.

Graduations.

Grey hair.

The quiet privilege
of looking across a room
twenty years later
and knowing

we made it.

You wrote that future
into music

and I believed you.

Of course I did.

Who hears a man
sing about growing old
beside her
and thinks

one day
I will climb through a window
to get away from him?

Who hears
watch the kids grow old

and imagines knives
crossing rooms?

Who hears
tomorrow

and prepares
to survive tonight?

I didn’t.

I heard home.

I heard permanence.

I heard someone
looking at the chaos
of my life
and saying

I want to stay
long enough
to see what happens next.

Maybe that is why
the song still aches
in places
anger cannot reach.

Because somewhere
inside those words
is a life
that never existed

but almost felt
like a memory.

Us,
older.

The kids,
grown.

You beside me.

A quiet evening
after everything
we thought
we would survive together.

And sometimes
I grieve her—

the woman
I would have become
inside that future.

Not because
I want you back.

God, no.

But because
she believed
she had finally found
someone
who planned
to stay.

She had no idea
that one day
her greatest accomplishment
would not be
growing old beside you.

It would be
getting away from you

so she could live
long enough

to watch the kids
grow old
without you.