Almost Poem by Kaziah K

When I said that loving you almost made life worth it,
I wasn't reaching for poetry,
I was begging for air.

When I said that loving you almost made me forget
how much I hated myself,
it wasn't romance.
it was survival.

Loving you had felt like taking every drop of warmth
I never thought I deserved
and handing it to someone who knew
how to hold it without letting it shatter.

You didn't heal me.
Nothing did.
I was still a graveyard of things I couldn't save,
a body stitched together with ache and half-closed wounds.

But your love, it sat quietly beside me,
never tried to stitch the pieces back together,
just held my trembling hands while I tried to stop the bleeding on my own.

And maybe, once,
it whispered a joke soft enough
that I stayed a little longer
just to laugh.

I loved you
with the kind of love that bruised from the inside,
the kind that hurt to carry
but hurt worse to put down.

And somehow,
in loving you,
I almost found a reason
to want to love myself too.