HOW DO YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT?

HOW DO YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT?

How do you sleep at night?
Do the stars hide from you?
Do the moon avert its face?
Do you lie as if the darkness itself
is a blanket soft enough
to cover the echoes of your deeds?
Do the planets tremble in their orbits
when you close your eyes
and remember the silence you forged,
the wound you planted
deep as the marrow of the world?

How do you move about your day?
Do your steps rattle the bones of your own history?
Do you glide as a shadow among men,
or do you stumble,
carrying the weight of fourteen years
like a mountain on your shoulders,
as if none of it ever existed,
as if every heartbeat, every vow, every sacred promise
were ash in the wind?

What do you do when I cross your mind?
Does it erupt like thunder across your skull?
Do you flinch,
or do you stand unmoved,
proud in the ruin you have made?
Do you hear my voice in the halls of your conscience,
or do you smother it,
let it shriek in the void
while you sip the comfort of your indifference?

What do you do
when you think about everything that transpired?
Do the ghosts of our years haunt you
or do you walk among them blind,
as if the sacred weight of memory
were nothing but smoke?

What do you do
when you think about cutting me out?
Do you savor the absence you crafted?
Do you taste it on your tongue like poison,
like wine too bitter to swallow,
or is it just air
and nothingness
that fills the hollow of your chest?

What do you think about?
Do you think at all
when the echo of fourteen years
cracks the sky above you?
Do you see the cosmos of us
fractured and burning?

What do you feel
when you think about the cut
that you gave me so deep,
so deep to the very core of my being,
and left it there in silence,
to fester,
to rot,
to gnaw at the walls of my soul
like a storm devouring the mountains?

Do you feel proud of yourself?
Do you feel relieved?
Do you feel sad?
Do you feel anything at all?
Do you wonder about me?
Does any of that truly matter
when a wound is deep
as you cut with intention,
with deliberation,
with malice?
Do you feel the weight of your own shadow
stretching across eternity,
or is it only the emptiness of a man
who has abandoned the sacred?

Where is there to go from there?
Have you not already spoken
in your silence,
in your actions,
in the ruin you left behind,
in the void you carved
into the heart of all that once trusted you?

What does it feel like
to toss away fourteen years?
To let them fall,
to crumble beneath your feet,
to cast the golden fire of our shared time
into nothing but ash
and let it scatter across the winds of fate?

What does it feel like
to walk away?
To abandon the sacred pulse of a life
that beat beside yours,
to leave it echoing
like a bell in an empty cathedral
while you move unscathed
through a world that knows nothing of your crime?

What does it feel like
to leave another standing in silence?
To leave me
in the cold,
in the dark,
with the echo of every vow unkept
screaming
into the chasm of your absence?

What does it say
about the man
who made vows,
who swore,
who promised,
who betrayed them?
Does the earth tremble beneath the weight of your lies,
or is the sky indifferent
to the desolation you have wrought?

Are you the man you wanted to be?
Are you the man you thought you are?
Are you the man you thought you would be?
Is this the man you want to be?
Do you look in the mirror
and see yourself,
or only the shadow of a man
who cut, and left,
and walked away,
while worlds burned behind him?