Between Bruises & Blooms

I have spent too many nights
being the oxygen
in someone else's lungs,
breathing life into men
who only ever noticed
my exhaustion
when I stopped answering.

My phone has become
another child crying in the dark,
another mouth demanding
something from me,
another set of hands
reaching for pieces
I no longer have to give.

But you are not my child.

And I am so fucking tired
of having to remind you.

I have four little hearts
that need me breathing,
four lives growing
beneath the shelter
of everything I have survived.

I do not have room
to raise a grown man
who mistakes my attention
for an umbilical cord
and calls his dependence
love.

You tell me
my voice is your medicine,
that hearing me breathe
through a telephone
quietens the monsters
inside your head.

But what about mine?

What about the nights
I lie awake afterward,
my own thoughts
clawing at the walls
of a mind
that never gets to rest?

What about the friendships
left unanswered,
the conversations with my father
I never got to finish,
the pieces of myself
I keep setting down
because you cannot bear
a moment of silence?

I asked for space.

Not permission.
Not forgiveness.
Not another apology
wrapped in declarations
of how badly
you need me.

Space.

And somehow
you heard abandonment.

Somehow
my silence became betrayal,
my exhaustion became rejection,
and my boundaries
became another wound
you expected me
to bandage.

You say
you cannot sleep without me.

I say
I cannot sleep because of you.

And still,
you cannot hear
the difference.

I will not be
the sobriety you borrow,
the happiness you demand,
the heartbeat you cling to
when you refuse
to find your own rhythm.

I am not your rehabilitation.

I am not your salvation.

I am not the woman
assigned to carry you
across every bridge
you refuse to build.

You have two daughters
who deserve a father
capable of standing
on his own two feet.

And I deserve
to exist beyond
what you need from me.

I deserve mornings
without interrogation,
evenings without guilt,
and nights
where my phone can lie silent
without becoming
a fucking emergency.

I deserve to laugh
with my friends,
to call my father,
to write until midnight,
to disappear between
the pages of a book
without someone
mistaking my peace
for punishment.

You are the father
of my children.

That is the place
you hold in my life.

Not the centre
of my universe.

Not the keeper
of my time.

Not the owner
of my silence.

And certainly not
another child
I am obligated
to raise.

I have spent enough years
teaching broken men
how to hold themselves together
while my own bones
splintered beneath
the weight of them.

So hear me
when I say this:

I am done
setting myself on fire
because you never learned
how to survive
the cold.

My life
does not begin
when you call.

And it does not end
when I refuse
to answer.