Allen B. McGinnis

They took her light,

left her hollowed,
or so they thought.

Eyes flood as her color fades,

A dungeon of echoes,

where her scream still burns
against the stone.

Mastering the language of silence,

to breathe through the bruises,

to wear her skin like armor
even when she trembled.

Her nights were harsh,

serpents coiling her dreams,
Whispering through,
She is the wreckage of her own making.

But she kept breathing,

a defiance so small
it became divine.

In the graveyard of her own flesh,

She planted something stubborn,

a seed of rage,
a seed of mercy.

To rise from ash and shadow,

forged together by her own hands.

No forgiveness owed,
no purity stolen.

Her body is hers!

Her name is hers!

The darkness that swallowed her,

now kneels when she speaks.

She is you.

I never stopped knowing the shape of you.
Not just your face,

but the way you existed against me,
how your breath would falter right before it synced with mine,

how your silence said more
than most people's confessions ever could.

You didn't just leave,

you stayed in the marrow of me.

Time didn't take you away.

It just taught me how to carry you
without trembling in public.

But alone, in the dim, honest hours,
you still happen to me.

I still feel you in phantom ways:

in the space beside me that no one fills correctly,

in the way my hands hesitate,

as if they remember a body they were built to understand.

No one has ever learned me,
the way you did,
like you were reading something
you had written yourself.

Maybe that's what ruins me most,

that with you,
I wasn't performing,
wasn't guessing,
wasn't translating my heart into something acceptable.

I was just, known.
Do you understand what that does to a person?
To be seen that deeply and then returned to the world like nothing ever touched them?

I have tried,

God, I have tried,

to unlearn the gravity of you.
But every version of love since has felt like an imitation of something my soul already recognizes as real.

I don't want to remember you anymore,

I want to feel you again.

Not in memory,
not in softened, romanticized fragments,
But real, present, undeniable.

I want your voice breaking against my name,

the way it used to sound like it belonged there.

I want your hands certain, familiar,
not asking, not doubting,
just returning.

I want the quiet after, when the world would fall away
and it was just us existing like something inevitable,
like something that had always been
and always would be.

Tell me,
does it haunt you the way it haunts me?
Do you ever wake up reaching,

certain I was still there,

only to be met with absence, so sharp it felt personal?

Because I am still here,

not in the same place,
not the same person,

but still yours in a way.

I have never been able to undo.

And if there is even a fracture
in the life you've built without me,
even the smallest opening.

I would come back through it
 without hesitation,
without pride,
without pretending I didn't break when you left.

I don't want closure.
I don't want peace.

I want you,

in the raw, unfinished,

dangerous way
that never really let me go.

I carved a mirror from the night,

polished it with every flaw 
I tried to hide.


It showed me bones I'd borrowed,

names I'd wear like masks,

and the quiet truth,

I buried beneath borrowed light.

Progress is a funeral of my old self,
I light the pyre,

watching the false skin blister and curl,
collapsing into embers
,
that whisper who I used to be.

In the smoke,
I choke on shadows,

that once felt like home.


I inhale them anyway,

let them stain my lungs,

until I recognize the taste

of the person I feared to become.

In the dark,
I found the versions of me
that never learned to die.

Circling like starving wolves,
wearing my old smiles
as if they were trophies.

Every step forward drags a ghost,

every lesson draws blood.


Self-discovery is dissection,
and I am both the surgeon
and the corpse.

Yet somewhere in the wounds,

a pulse returns slow and stubborn,

but mine.

I rise from my own ruin,

not clean,
not redeemed,

but aware.

The darkness that shaped me,

now walks beside me,

no longer a monster,

but a mirror I finally learned to face.

Self-improvement is a ritual,
and I am its latest creature.

Don't disappear for me
,
just come closer.

I don't want your light dimmed,

I want it on my skin.


Keep your wild, your hunger,

your pulse that doesn't wait for permission.

I want to feel it
against my breath,
beneath my hands,

a rhythm that doesn't end where I begin.

I'm not here to quiet you.

I want your chaos to meet mine,

to crash, to spark,

to find that perfect edge where control dissolves

but the truth stays intact.


Your fire,
my fire
,
not surrender,

but ignition.

Let's not blend until we blur,
Let us collide until we bloom.

I want to know your soul by the way you move,

The way you look at me when words fall useless.

Bring it all,

Keep who you are,
And together,

let's burn the world into something new.