I never asked for this. Yet again, it’s handed to me as if it was always mine— your weight, your storms, your unfinished wars. I see you fighting yourself through me. Asking me for the peace you refuse to find inside your own chest. And I stand there every day, like a monument— turning myself to concrete just to withstand the bullets of your wounds. Bullets aimed at the only target you know: my being, my steadiness, my refusal to collapse so you can feel in control for five borrowed minutes. And the truth is— no matter how gently you wrap your reasons, no matter how many times you insist you “care,” I see past it. Past the gestures. Past the performance. Past the parts that look like love but feel like strategy. I see the foundation where care should live and doesn’t— not lacking as in less, but lacking as in never existed. And it is unkind— how you press yourself against the one part of me you haven’t managed to break, how you place your weight on me so lightly in your own mind, yet I am the one carrying all of it while you walk away unburdened. I name it— the control, the sharpness, the absence of kindness. You say you’re none of that— that only I make you “like this.” That only I turn you into what you already are. But you never ask if you’ve stayed long enough with anyone else for them to see this part of you. And still— I am the one who holds the answer. It is exhausting, I know. And beneath the ruin, beneath the concrete, beneath the weight you give me and refuse to take back— I hold something you never look at. Hope. Not hope that you will change. But hope that I will return to myself— that the monument will turn back into a woman, that the concrete will fall away, and I will finally stand in a world that does not require me to be stone.
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