Broken oreos

And I will let you go, even if it is the hardest thing I do, because only in surrender do endings come with mercy. You became a habit I never meant to form. Threads of conversation stitched across the day, until hours felt incomplete without you. It was never grand, never loud, just the quiet certainty of your presence. Perhaps that is why it feels impossible now, to cut you out cleanly, to erase what has seeped so deep. But here is the truth I always knew: even the faintest pencil leaves its ghost, and you never came in pencil. You came in ink.

I laid myself bare before you, a blank page trembling in the wind, and you held a fountain pen. The kind that bleeds when pressed too hard. And you did—you pressed too hard. Ink spread wild, spilling into corners it was never meant to reach, until my heart, once unmarked, became a page ruined with stains no hand could erase.

I tried to wash it. But ink is stubborn. It seeps into the grain, binds itself to the fibers, becomes inseparable. In desperation I scrubbed, and instead dragged the black across myself. My white dress darkened to night, smudged with the same ink that ruined my heart. And when you told me I looked beautiful in black, I believed you. I believed ruin could be love, so I wore it like devotion. And I gave you another pen.

Why? Because I was afraid. Afraid you would leave. Afraid the silence would crush me. Afraid of being abandoned in the cold I had lived in before you. So I chose hope over caution. Wounds over emptiness. My heart already carried scars, yet I offered it again. And even then you struck. You pierced too deep, twice, and still I forgave you. Because even as the ink bled through me, I thought—if the ink belonged to you, then perhaps I belonged too.

But I should have known better. I should have recognized the danger of placing the third pen in your hand. A glass pen, delicate and dazzling, transparent like frozen smoke, its tip sharp as ice. When light touched it, colors fractured like a broken rainbow. Beautiful, yes, but brittle. And in your grip, it snapped. Shards carved into my ribs as ink poured faster, flooding my bloodstream. It seeped into every organ, until I was no longer a person but a vessel, carrying nothing but black.

The cruelest part is that you do not know. You do not know the weight I carry, the projection I made of you, how I stitched you into my existence while you lived unaware of the ruin blooming in me. You were etched into my routine. But you do not know how deeply I made you responsible for a heart you never asked to hold.

So here I remain, like a dying swan, its final song carrying not joy but surrender. I bleed, but this time I bleed on paper. Because the truth is unshakable: the ink will always be yours. My hands are stained, my chest hollowed out, and yet I write. For writing is the only way I can make sense of the ruin. And in these words, and in my final act of love, I release you.

Bye bye, birdie