I buried the key to my heart under the roots of a sycamore tree,
told myself I’d never need to open that door again.
Too many ghosts living rent-free in my ribcage,
too many half-smiles that tasted like lies.
I learned silence before I learned solace,
learned how to hold myself the way no one ever did—
arms like prayer, back like a battlefield.
Love felt like war,
and I was tired of dying for it.

But here you come,
soft as a revolution.
Not loud. Not loud like the others.
But present.
Like a heartbeat I didn’t know I missed.
You don’t ask for the key.
You kneel in the dirt with me,
dig beside me
until I remember the rhythm of trust,
the melody of beginning again.

Yeah, I was stitched from the static of breakups and baggage,
flipped my own switch and I blacked out the damage—
every “never again” was a line I rehearsed,
but I bled it in bars and I screamed it in verse.

I was king of the guarded,
a martyr, cold-hearted—
built a fortress of thorns like my pain was an art,
like I needed a stage just to tear it apart.

You?
You walked in like the first note of jazz,
offbeat, divine,
disarming my past with a glance and some time.

No Cupid, no fairytale,
you were a fault line—
but instead of collapse, you gave shape to the climb.

I’m learning again how to say what I feel
without sounding like trauma dressed up as a meal.
I’m learning again how to hold, not to cling,
how to water a garden and not break the spring.

Maybe love isn’t a rescue.
Maybe it’s a remembering.
Of who we were before the ache,
before we called pain home.

You are not my savior.
You are my mirror,
clean and cracked,
showing me I can still be whole
in the shimmer.

So I plant a new seed
where the sycamore grows,
and this time—
I leave the door open.