If Love Is Like This

If love is like this, then I would rather walk away for what we called love was only a shadow wearing its name. There was never love, not the kind that breathes and grows; you cannot bind me with the children to anchor what is already drowning. What about me? What about my happiness, my dignity, my voice? No respect, no love. No attention, no love. No understanding, no love for true love is built on these foundations, stone by unshakable stone. And ours was poured on sand, on whispers, on half-truths. How can I be a man when I am treated as merely a child silenced, dismissed, reduced to an echo in my own home? The relationship was built on the foundation of lies, and every promise we laid cracked beneath the weight of pretense. So I choose to let you go. Not out of malice, but out of mercy for both of us. My heart has been broken, my soul has been crushed beneath the years of begging to be seen, to be heard, to matter. So I say goodbye. It doesn’t hurt anymore, not in the way it once did, because my heart is already full of scars and gorges, full of sores and wounds that learned to beat without bleeding. Pain became my teacher when love refused to be my shelte