Fault Line

It did not unravel - it split like crockery dropped on tiles -

that sharp, unarguable sound of splintering

then the silence that follows.

One morning the air was ordinary,

but by evening it had teeth that bit at the threads of the tapestry,

until the pattern forgot itself.

The flat - half-packed, half-lived-in - began to echo before I left it

with drawers open like gossiping mouths,

and ash on the sofa where friendships had burnt.

Love did not fade, it vanished mid-sentence,

a cup still warm on the table

whilst I held the remnants of you.

And the office - fluorescent hum-carpet ground thin by pacing -

where I'd felt my own name thinning like paper left in the rain.

When I walked out my hands were trembling fists

but they were mine,

ready to be unfurled, palms up and out towards the

wideness of the world.

Afterwards, everything felt borderless.

Sleep came in shards, grief arrived without knocking,

even the kettle boiling sounded like an accusation.

I kept expecting myself to collapse into someone smaller

to apologise for the fracture, to gather the pieces

and pretend they had never been whole.

But something subterranean held.

Not strength exactly,

more like the bedrock of refusing to live misnamed.

And in the wreckage - because there was wreckage - space opened.

Raw space, unfurnished and beckoning.

In it I could hear who remained;

the friends who stepped closer without me asking,

who did not flinch at the sharp edges I'd become.

Through this, I learned the precise weight of my own heart,

how it bruises, does not bargain, and it's strength in choosing

exile over erosion.

The year broke across me like a storm

but it did not take my outline.

If anything, I am more distinctly drawn,

as if the fault line lit from underneath

to show me where the ground is solid.