Takotsubo -For the Heart That Could Not Hold
It begins quietly.
Not as pain—
no, pain would be honest.
It begins as a hush
where your name used to echo,
as a weightless ache blooming
like smoke from a fire
that has already forgotten
what warmth was.
They call it heartbreak,
but no—
this is architecture.
A house collapsing inward
because it was built
on the trembling of your hands.
Dopamine drips like slow poison.
Oxytocin stains the air
where you stood,
soft and cruel,
the way shadows are.
And the heart,
oh the heart—
it doesn’t shatter.
It folds,
like paper soaked through,
like a letter never sent.
There is no danger here.
Only the quiet violence
of remembering
you are gone.
Fight or flight?
Foolish words.
Where can I flee
when you are the distance?
What can I fight
when you are the absence?
The breath that once
ran toward you
now leaves without looking back,
a stray wind
through a door I no longer close.
And still,
this body rehearses survival,
teaches itself
to cradle the empty,
to wake with the knowing
that some vessels
were never meant
to be full.
Not sickness.
Not wound.
Just the living art
of breaking
without end.
And God,
what a beautiful ruin
you’ve left me in.
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