u/moonlitremains

Bravery looks different now.

Less like setting myself on fire to keep the silence warm,
more like letting an unlocked tenderness exist beside me without checking where it hides the knife.

Some nights
it is believing that gentleness is not just danger speaking in a softer dialect,

that a hand can reach for me
without asking my body to abandon itself in exchange.

Some nights
it is saying no and remaining long enough to watch nothing collapse,

learning how unfamiliar it feels
when love does not turn my boundaries into broken furniture.

Bravery looks different now.

Less like surviving the room by becoming smaller than it needed me to be,
more like staying inside my own skin while the door stays open.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/5Vn7vt5nqK

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/XRg2bCMmDO

You carried gentleness
like contraband.

Warmth with a hidden blade.

Your voice moved through the room
like a match deciding
what belongs to fire.

I knew better.

Still, I stepped closer,
going over the speed limit
of reason,
of restraint,
of every carefully posted warning sign.

Not chaos.

Something quieter than that.

A river teaching stone
how to surrender.
A bruise flowering
beneath unbroken skin.

You entered my life
the way storms enter power lines.

Invisible at first.

Then everything humming
with consequences.

And the mercy of it.

To be handled
like something sacred
while feeling annihilation
turn slowly in the lock.

The cruelest thing about tenderness
is how often
you only realize
you were going over the speed limit
after the body has mistaken
impact
for arrival.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/itRNicDZzp

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/HzwfrFjBgT