Corey's Collection

It began not with a look, but with a cadence. I fell for the architecture of your stories before I ever knew their weight, captivated by the way your words built worlds out of thin air. I had the mind to see the truth in them, to map the logic of your heart, and I followed that map like a scholar seeking a holy text. I fell in love with the brilliance first, the brain that could put a pulse to the truth and make the abstract feel like home. But inside, the foundation was soft with rot. We brought the old hurt within, the phantom of a door always slamming. Abandonment was a language I spoke fluently without realizing it, a script that told me to pull before I could be pushed, to stay small and jagged so no one could push me away. You were the one who held the lantern to my errors. You helped me find the "why" behind my actions, at the cost of the silence, and you forced me to look at the wreckage I called protection. I did the heavy lifting of the soul. I learned to stay. I learned to breathe. I'm still learning how to be whole. But the clock is a cruel witness to a man’s evolution. I finally became the person you deserved, just as you decided you deserved to live without the weight of me. The truth I finally learned was the one you delivered with a scalpel. You saw the scars, and you treated our history like a cell gone wrong, a malignancy you had to remove to keep your own heart beating. You cut me out like a cancer, swift and clinical and final, leaving me standing in the light you gave me.

The quiet is a surgical blade. It carves out the noise of the prideful tongue until only the sediment of truth remains. In this void, enlightenment is not a flash of light but a slow, cold dawning. I see the architecture of my own mistakes, calcified and heavy. I was wrong. I was blind. The admission is a tide pulling back to reveal the wreckage I left behind. A person can splinter until they are nothing but dust and memory. We are fragile vessels, prone to the cracks of our own making. Yet, love is a permanent resident in the ruins. It does not pack its bags when the house falls down. It is the subterranean river that flows beneath the broken stone, waiting for the soil to settle. I am gathering the shards now, one deliberate piece at a time. This reconstruction is slow and the work is quiet. I am not building a monument for an audience to applaud. I am not refining my soul to settle a debt or to win back a heart that may have moved on. This evolution is a private sanctum. I am becoming better for the sake of the man who looks back at me from the glass. I am learning to be whole for the person I have spent my entire life ignoring. The journey upward is long, but it is for me. It is for the self I am finally learning to love.

In the hollow where the white fires hiss and scream, She rose from the anvil, a sharp-edged dream. Not of flesh, nor of silk, nor of mortal design, But forged in the marrow of an iron-rich mine. Her crown is a halo of splintered steel, A jagged reminder of the wounds that won’t heal. She walks through the smoke with a rhythmic stride, With a thousand sharp secrets tucked close to her side. Her eyes are the grey of a winter-locked sea, Reflecting the choices of who is to be. In her right hand, the rapier: a thin, silver breath; In her left, the claymore: the heavy weight of death. She does not love battle, nor the thirst for the red, But she honors the steel and the words left unsaid. She is the precision in the arch of the swing, The high, lonely note when the dual blades ring. To some, she is terror, a flash in the dark, To others, the guardian, the shield, and the spark. When the dust finally settles and the banners are torn, She stands in the silence of the cold, early morn. She wipes clean the metal, she sheathes every blade, The mistress of balance, in light and in shade. For every sharp edge is a path to be trod, The mercy and justice of the Iron-Souled God.

I lived in a house of mirrors, mistaking the glare for a sunrise. I had convinced myself that the warmth was an invitation, a divine script written in the margins of my own hope. I thought I was happy, or perhaps I just fell in love with the silhouette of it. I see the layout clearly now, through a lens stripped of its gold. I misunderstood us, I saw pillars where there were only shadows, and interpreted the heavy quiet as a shared breath, rather than a slow, steady retreat. The fantasy was a soft place to land, a velvet curtain drawn over a reality I wasn’t ready to face. It wasn’t that the world was broken, but that my eyes were adjusted to a light that didn't exist. I was searching for a missing piece that I had convinced myself was gone, only to find it was never missing at all. Now the air is colder, and the colors are honest. I am sifting through the debris of what I thought I knew, and in the center of the ruins, untouched by the decay of my own delusions, the truth remains: She was always enough.

I swoon from desire of words from your lips. It feeds my fire, Which smoldered on the day that we two met. It flames anew with phoenix wings, To fly into my heart, And like the sunset's silent roar, It thunders ever nearer, The vision so much clearer, Than it was right from the start. I tremble in the presence of your love It was always more than enough