The Expensive Woman

This is not the venom you expected, the poem with teeth, or the prayer for your downfall. I have no interest in the architecture of karma or wishing for your world to go dark. I only know how to speak in the language of what I love— so I wish you the cabin, the quiet, and the timber. I wish you the sight of your son carving circles into the lake, the jet ski’s wake a signature of a life that blooms in the very space where I used to stand. See how beautifully your world turns since you walked away from me?

You predicted my mind would fracture without the two of you. You were brilliant, but you were wrong. My life is a different shape now, and I am not ashamed. I walk into rooms carrying a weight that isn’t yours; I have found a confidence that commands the air. I am expensive now. I am a rare currency. I carry a strength that doesn't ask for permission, a presence so grounded it needs no one to name it.

I have scrubbed you from my muscle memory. I have convinced my blood and my bone that they no longer need you. Thirty-six days of abstinence. Thirty-six days of choosing the hunger over the poison, the discipline over the ghost. The cravings are rare now—passing shadows in a bright room. And now that I know the cold geography of withdrawal, I will never navigate my way back to that shore again.

I am no longer a ghost haunting my own hallways. I am building a temple out of the silence you left behind. You said I would lose my mind, but I only lost the chains that kept me small. I am not the person you left; I am the one who stayed to clean up the wreckage and found gold beneath the dust.

So go to the water. Build your walls on the family land. Watch the ripples until they fade to nothing. You are free to be happy, and I am finally expensive enough to never let myself be discounted again. The greatest thing that ever happened to me was losing two great loves, only to realize I was the one I’d been waiting for.

Chloe