heart on a noose

Heart on a noose

I didn’t get this tattoo for beauty. I got it because i lived it.

a heart—cracked, stitched, hung by a noose, not broken cleanly, but torn slow.

“i’m wearing my heart on a noose.”
that line cut me open. Because that’s exactly what it’s been: a slow kind of death that never finishes. Love being suicide , the giving that hollowed me, the silence after “i love you” that lasted years.

The stitches aren’t for show, they’re every time i stayed, every time i left, every time i came back to myself bleeding but breathing.

I thought that was it, that love meant survival and nothing more and then came you – Joel.

soft hands, a steady voice. a place to land when i was still bracing for the fall.

and now i’m terrified—
because you don’t hurt me and i don’t know what to do with that.

the noose is fear.
the heart is me.
and the stitches— they’re mine and they are you helping mend a heart that has been tortured and broken, that I thought would stay that way forever,