What Your Betrayal Left Behind

You didn’t just lie.
You rewrote history with your own hands,
scratched out my name,
ripped whole chapters from the book of us,
tossed them to the wind and watched them scatter like ash.
You stood in the wreckage,
dusted off your hands,
and called it a misunderstanding.

But I know the truth.

You didn’t stumble into cruelty—
you carved a path to it, deliberate,
a slow and steady destruction,
the kind of ruin that wears a friendly face.
You counted heads,
made sure there was just one too many,
watched me arrive,
watched me realize,
watched my face fall—
and you smiled.

You are a natural disaster in disguise,
an earthquake dressed as solid ground,
a flood that pretended to be a river.
And I?
I was just a town that didn’t know the storm was already inside the walls.

Do you know what you’ve done?

Do you know what it means to be erased?
To hear laughter and wonder if it’s at your expense?
To see old friends in passing and feel their eyes skim over you,
like you are nothing more than a glitch in the memory,
an unremarkable shadow that once walked among them?

You took more than trust.
You took my place.
You peeled me from my own life like wallpaper,
like I was meant to come down eventually,
meant to be replaced.

And then—
then you had the audacity to be over it.
Like it was so easy.
Like betrayal is just a chapter you get to close.
Like what you did isn’t still unraveling in the hands of the people you poisoned.
Like I don’t still wake up wondering who I would have been
if I had never met you.

But tell me—
how does it feel to walk away untouched?
To leave the scene of the crime without a speck of blood on your hands?
Do you tell yourself you did nothing wrong?
Do you sleep soundly while I pick the shrapnel from my skin?
Do you call it justice,
call it fate,
call it over
while I still live in the ruins?

I hope the silence is deafening.
I hope the absence feels like weight.
I hope you stand in rooms where I used to belong
and feel the space where I should have been.

I hope you know that even if I rise,
even if I rebuild,
even if I grow into something so vast and brilliant
that you cannot look at me without squinting—
I will always remember what you did.