The Gift

You called it exile.
A sentence meant to wound,
a hollowed theatre where you believed
my grief would echo.
You tore yourself from my days
as if absence were a weapon,
as if your vanishing were sharp enough
to cut me open.

You named it punishment,
delusion crowning you with grandeur—
imagining my body bent,
my nights undone,
my lungs desperate for the oxygen of you.

But tell me,
how does one mourn
the lifting of a stone from their chest?
How does one weep
for the sudden gift of air?

Your absence is not my ending—
it is my genesis.
The first morning in years
the sky broke open clean,
the first hour the air moved freely
through the rooms of my body.

This is the miracle:
that you mistook your retreat
for my ruin,
never knowing it was deliverance.

You wrapped it in cruelty,
in the silk of your imagined power,
but what you gave me was freedom—
a gift I never thought would arrive,
a mercy I never dared believe in.

And as you crown yourself
with fantasies of my collapse,
I stand unbound.
Breathing.
Whole.

The only death rattle here
is the echo of your absence—
not the sound of me dying,
but the sound of me
finally alive.

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