I drank her away.
Glass after glass, til the sky started leaning and the walls softened their stance.
Til my reflection forgot how to look like me.
Til my mouth forgot how to say her name without catching on fire.

It wasn’t just heartbreak. It was protest.
A riot in my ribs.
Because loving her felt like hope, and hope is a dangerous thing to hold when the world keeps proving it doesn’t know how to cradle delicate things.

She was soft. And sharp.
Like those tiny revolutions that bloom in quiet places.
She had a mind like a manifesto and a mouth like a miracle.
And I — I was a walking wound with a thirst for forgetting.

So I turned wine into water and drowned in it.
Built a cathedral out of bar tabs and broken promises.
Confessed to every sin but the one that mattered —
that I couldn’t stay sober
if it meant sitting still in the shape of her absence.

I drank her away because memory is a tyrant.
Because her laugh echoed like a war drum in my chest.
Because the ghost of her fingertips traced rebellion on my skin
long after she left me to make peace with myself.

And still —
even now —
with my liver preaching sermons of regret,
with my bones aching for the weight I once held,
I know
she was never mine to lose.

She was a revolution I wasn’t ready for.
A garden I burned just to stay warm.

And maybe healing looks like truth.
Like standing still in the wreckage and planting seeds anyway.
Like writing poems with trembling hands
and no chaser.

I drank her away.
But she stayed in my blood.
Not as poison —
but as prayer.