There were people at the window
long before I knew their names.
They stood outside the little lit rooms of my life,
watching birthdays bloom and disappear,
watching my daughter grow taller,
watching holidays gather themselves
around our table.
And all that time I was living.
Teaching. Loving.
Making coffee.
Folding towels.
Buying groceries for three.
Building ordinary days
with my person.
The man who rose back from the dead
for me.
For his girls.
I did not know my happiness
had spectators.
I did not know strangers
were studying the architecture of us
the photographs,
the absences,
the sudden silences.
I did not know
the man inside the house with me
had been leaving doors unlocked.
Then one day
those strangers knocked.
They came carrying truth
like water to a burning house.
“Look,” they said.
Look what he has done.
Give me all your information, they demanded.
And I looked.
God, I looked.
I let strangers lead me
through the wreckage of my own life,
holding up pieces I recognized.
His words,
His promises,
His tenderness,
with someone else’s fingerprints on them.
I thought we were standing
in the ashes together.
She told me the fire was monstrous.
She told me she had seen enough.
She told me what it could cost her
her children,
her body,
her peace.
Then she asked if I was surviving.
And while I answered,
she crossed an ocean
toward the match.
There is a particular violence
in someone holding your grief
with one hand
while reaching for its source
with the other.
She had stood inside the wound.
She knew its dimensions.
She knew exactly where it hurt.
And went there anyway.
And him
what language is left
for a man who has already
used every word twice?
Love.
Forever.
Home.
Family.
How strange
that lies can wear such beautiful names.
But he always came back.
That was the promise
he never had to make.
He could leave.
Disappear.
Put whole seasons
between his hands and mine
but eventually,
there he would be again.
At the door.
At the table.
Back inside the life
that had learned his shape.
He always came back to me.
So many times
I mistook returning
for proof.
I thought every road in him
still pointed home.
To me.
To us.
I thought returns
meant being chosen.
I know now
a person can come back
again and again
and still never learn
how to stay.
That is the devastation.
I loved him beyond reason.
There was a child in that love.
There were plans.
There were rings.
There were years.
There was a woman who believed him
because love should not require
cross-examination.
And there was him,
watching me believe.
I don't know how to mourn
someone who is still breathing.
There is no funeral
for the death of a future.
No casseroles arrive.
No one sends flowers.
And still,
something died.
The man I loved
is dead to me.
The man whose chest
I once believed
was the safest place
to put my grief.
The chest that carries my name
in ink
twice
as though permanence
could be written into skin.
The man I thought
would choose his girls
when choosing mattered.
Let that man be dead.
But I will not say
rest in peace.
Peace is too gentle
for what he left behind.
Rest in every story
you must keep straight.
Rest among the mirrors
until you cannot remember
which reflection
you handed to whom.
Rest in the ruins
of every home you entered
asking to be loved
while carrying matches
behind your back.
Rest in chaos.
The chaos you handed
to everyone who loved you
and walked away from
as though the wreckage
belonged to us.
It doesn't anymore.
Let the people at the window
have their labyrinth.
Their changing photographs.
Their locked doors.
Their stories inside stories.
I have stopped needing to know.
I know what happened to me.
I loved a man
who made secrecy a second home
and asked me to apologize
for hearing footsteps upstairs.
I was watched
by people I did not know.
I was handed truths
I cannot unknow
by hands that were not clean
of the story themselves.
So tonight
I close the curtains.
Not because I am ashamed,
but because a window
is not an invitation.
My life is not evidence.
My daughter is not collateral.
My love was not stupidity
because someone exploited it.
My devastation is proof
that I was there.
That I meant it.
So let them wonder now.
Let them search
and find nothing.
Let him become
a story I no longer check
for new chapters.
Let him be dead to me.
And no
do not rest in peace.
Rest in chaos.
