inheritance 🌊

i didn’t set out to be a savior,

just a place for the rain to stop.

but you arrived like a house already burning,

carrying the ash of a home that broke

before you ever learned to build.

i tried to be the silver backing to your glass,

but you were a smashed mirror,

jagged, sharp, and stubbornly incomplete.

i spent years on the floor with the glue and the tape,

trying to press my skin into the gaps,

hoping if I bled enough, i could be the missing piece.

but some puzzles are missing their edges.

some frames are warped by the ghosts of the men

who came before you,

the fathers, the brothers, the hollow-eyed kin

who traded their blood for a chemical hum.

you were running so hard from their shadow

that you didn’t see yourself becoming the dark.

i offered a shoulder, you offered a wall.

i offered a map, you chose the fog.

eventually, the default won,

that old family sickness, a slow-motion heist

that stole your mind and left the rest behind.

they say your words are a tangled wire now,

that your brain is a city with the power cut out.

and though I reach for the ghost of who you were,

i had to drop the shards to save my own hands.

i didn’t leave because I stopped caring,

i left because i was disappearing into your wreckage.

i handed you back your own despair,

not because i wanted you to drown,

but because i finally realized

you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.