Soft Enough To Bleed

Part 6: Anatomy Of The Aftermath

Anatomy Of The Aftermath

My body keeps the score.

And it's failing every subject since you left.

Grief has made a major of my mind,

A dropout of my dignity.

There are tremors in my temples,

And a fault line under my tongue where your name used to live.

My scalp sings sorrow,

Each strand of hair aching,

With the memory of hands that once held me like promises,

Then forgot to keep them.

My throat has become a museum of almosts,

Curating the syllables I swallowed,

Just to keep you a little longer.

Now I only speak in sharp exhales and choking silences.

My chest is a war-torn continent,

Lungs breathing debris,

Ribs cracked open like a chapel post-collapse.

My heart still pulses in protest,

Still naming you with every beat it shouldn't have survived.

My hands twitch with the need to dial,to write, to rage,

To build a bridge back to the wreckage and sit in it.

Not to fix-just to remember.

My hips carry phantom limbs of your presence.

You are a shadow stitched into my posture,

A weight I wasn't built to bear.

Even in my walk,

I drag your absence behind me like a second spine.

My knees buckle in private,

Surrendering to a war that never ended,

And my feet -they refuse direction.

I wander, I spiral,

I map circles into the carpet,

Like maybe I'll loop back to you

if I pace long enough.

And still -

I check my phone like maybe grief can text back.

Like maybe your name will flash and undo the damage.

But it's just me.

Bleeding through blue ticks.

Staring at a screen that's learned to ghost me better than you ever did.

This is what you made of me-

A temple turned trauma site,

A full-body elegy,

An aftermath with anatomy.