Hearts Erased

Your home is a graveyard
Haunted by voices of the past
Buried in cobwebs on your heart
Cold, dead plots you lay in at night.

No hope of happiness in sight
Only mortal death stalking prey
Condescending oppression in your castle of eggshells
The pain in your eyes flickers like candles in the wind.

So turn out the lights, one more night
And let the stinging dirt shower over you
Let’s the coldness engulf you forevermore
Burning that lodge of dysfunction to the ground.

Your recent sudden departure is more than unsettling
The way you bundle me up and toss me away is murder from the love of my life
The voices in your head and the familiar cries in your ears
Whisk you away like a swift kidnapping
Vanishing you without a trace
Yanked by the heavy chains that mummify your living corpse
Dying in everything that holds you down
Drowning us both in your twisted inability to live a life worth living.

“It’s easy to tell yourself it’s not that bad, and it’s really easy to look at your children while you are all sitting around the dinner table and tell yourself you will stay together to save them.

I’m speaking from experience here:
Staying in a marriage where there is no love is not saving your children. Not even a little bit. Yes, we know it’s going to disrupt and hurt our children if we split. And doing anything to disrupt and hurt them feels unnatural. So, we cling. We stay. We fight the good fight with their feelings and hearts at the forefront of our minds.

We cannot ignore a very important point here: When parents force themselves to stay together when aren’t happy, this is what damages the kids most of all. My husband and I started having problems when our youngest was four years old, and guess what? She knew.

Once I realized my marriage was not about my children, but about the partnership between me and my ex-husband, I was able to get really clear about why we should divorce so I could let my guilt go. We made vows to each other before our kids were born that we weren’t able to honor. Almost every one was broken.

We were in love once, made a beautiful family, but that love went away. We tried, but we weren’t able to get it back. We both deserve to find it again, and our kids need to see both of us loved in the right way. We knew it wasn’t going to be with each other, and trying to fake it for their sake was destroying us. It could have destroyed them, too.

Because we split, they see us getting along. They see us both feeling more at peace and living our best lives. They see us communicating better. They see us putting ourselves first which is setting a good example for them. There’s an impact on the kids when their parents divorce, for sure. I’m not arguing that. How can there not be? But what I’m saying is, if we stayed together for them and they found out our miserableness was for their sake, I truly believe that would cause a lot more harm than our divorce ever did.

It takes time, but the kids adjust to their new life; they adjust to seeing their parents happier for not being together. But they never adjust to watching the two adults in their house walk around unhappy every day.

Staying together for your kids is a bullshit reason to stay married. Stay together for you, separate for you, divorce for you, but not for anyone else. If you aren’t taking a stand for yourself and your happiness, no one else will, regardless of what you sacrifice for them.”

Days away from two years with you
And you break me yet again
A week ago we celebrated our bonus year
Undetected in your web of deceit
Never closer and never deeper in love
But can only last so long with your indecisive heartbreak
While those that hold you down tighten their grip
Back to the slavery of misery on our souls.

You make me ache
You wield evil in your attempt at good
This blindness infests you
If only you surrender your paralytic ways.

Don’t you yearn to fly?
To breathe air no longer stifled with oppression?
To experience your life as it was meant to be?
Unbridled and unembarrassed, and unashamed?

Step out from his asinine shadow
Remove yourself from this cocktail of disgust
Untarnish your title of womanhood
That you may carve a way for all that struggle like you.

Your life is a river, and you are a dam
You’re in your dinghy, paddling madly upstream
You’ve gone over the waterfall, and you’re hanging onto a vine for dear life
In the fluidity of existence, you have gummed up your works.

Your life is a one way street and everyone is honking at you
The crosswalk is lit green and you’re standing on the same side of the street
You’re broken down in rush hour traffic
The direction of your life is not waiting for your fear to be conquered much longer.

Your life is a ticking clock and time is running out
To fight your future and your happiness is absolutely futile
Time will not reverse and there is no undoing what has happened
Now is the time to release your grip on all that should be left in the past.