She Stays Poem by Jennifer Rahn

Not because she is blind.
Not because she is weak.
She stays because love once learned her name
and she never forgot the sound of it.

He says it is nothing.
He says she is imagining things.
He says her hands are shaking because she wants to fight.
But she has screenshots folded into her silence.
Dates. Times. Faces she does not recognize
but now knows too well.

She knows the truth the way you know a bruise
before you lift your sleeve.
She knows it before he opens his mouth.

Still he lies.
Soft lies.
Lazy lies.
Lies that insult her intelligence
and beg for her mercy at the same time.

She watches him practice his innocence
in the mirror of her eyes.
He swears loyalty while standing on broken glass
and asks why she is bleeding.

The damage is quiet.
It does not scream.
It settles.

It eats at her sleep.
It changes how she laughs.
It teaches her to doubt her own memory,
her own instincts,
her own worth.

She replays conversations like crime scenes.
What did I miss.
What did I do wrong.
What part of me was not enough.

Love turns heavy in her chest.
It pulls instead of lifts.
It asks her to carry what he refuses to hold.

She loves him.
That is the tragedy.
That is the reason she keeps choosing hope
even when hope keeps betraying her.

Each lie takes a small piece of her
and calls it forgiveness.
Each betrayal asks her to be smaller
so he can stay comfortable.

One day she will look at herself
and barely recognize the woman who stayed.
Not because she was foolish.
But because she loved harder
than he ever respected.

And the saddest part
is not that he cheated.
It is that he watched her break
and kept lying anyway.