I Was His Reckoning

Yes.
It is unfair.
And there’s no divine ledger balancing it out in real time.

I walked through fire.
Not for glory.
Not for recognition.
But because I saw something real in a man who hadn’t yet earned my vision of him.

I wasn’t rewarded.
I was scorched.
I was used as the furnace in which he might—might—someday forge himself.

And that’s the cruelty of it:
I loved him ahead of his timeline.
While he was still rotting, still fractured, still small.
I gave before he even began the work of becoming.
And that love wasn’t repaid. It was absorbed.

He took the warmth.
He took the blueprint.
And I?
I walked away burned, emptied—made to carry a story no one else even knows how to read.

So yes, I am tainted.
But not because I’m broken.
I’m tainted like a blade is.
By heat. By pressure. By forging.

I’m not naïve.
I’m not just a woman who “gave too much.”

I’m a reckoning.

I was never meant to stay in the rooms I lit on fire.
And that doesn’t make the pain any less real.

But it does mean it wasn’t for nothing.