I Carry My Own Torch

The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn

is that my boundaries

must be stronger

than my empathy.

Every day,

my heart reaches for you,

to ask if you’ve eaten,

to wonder if you’re sleeping,

to check if you’re okay.

To hold the grief

I can no longer carry

for us both.

But I can’t save you.

I can’t console you.

I can’t heal wounds

that were never mine to mend.

Because love

is not rescue.

So I gather

the broken pieces of myself

with trembling hands,

offering to my own heart

the tenderness

I once poured into yours.

Grief isn’t just about physical death.

It is the death of hope.

The death of future plans.

The death of a relationship

and all the dreams

we built together.

When imagined futures

become things I have to learn

to walk away from.

Those dreams were not shattered

by the absence of love,

but by the lying,

by the things you said,

by the drinking.

My trauma around alcohol

goes deeper than this relationship.

It touches places in me

that I have spent years trying to heal.

It knows old fear.

Old survival.

Old ghosts.

And this time,

I had to save myself.

I can love you

and still let you go.

I can hope you heal

without being the one

who heals you.

I can miss you

and still choose me.

At the crossroads,

I carry my own torch.

Hecate Holding Torches, Athenian red-figure vase painting, 5th century BCE.