Sanctuary in Fragments

I have always been a stepping stone, a passing place, a shadowed harbor where the broken come to rest. I’m the fixer, the healer, the quiet keeper of other people’s pain. I’m just a brief sanctuary, a borrowed light, the layover on someone else’s journey.

I’ve been the place people stumble into when they’re broken, when the world has gutted them and they need somewhere soft to land. They arrive splintered and I take them in, pressing their broken edges against my own until I bleed enough to make them whole. People find me when their hands are trembling and their hearts are splitting at the seams, and I love them as if their ruin were my own. I become the thread, the glue, the binding force that convinces them they are not broken beyond repair. And I’ve given that softness, again and again, stitching up their wounds with my own hands, pouring light into the cracks they swore would never close. I’ve steadied people when they couldn’t stand, carried their weight when they couldn’t take another step, and whispered life back into them when they were ready to give up.

And when they are whole enough to walk again… they leave. They always leave. They step into their next chapter, carrying my light inside them, never realizing it was borrowed, never seeing the cost of what they take. My light, my love, my energy… all sewn into their healing. They don’t see that the patches holding them together are fragments of me, threads pulled from my own veins. That the warmth in their chest is the echo of my fire, smoldering where once it roared because I’ve given embers of it away until there’s nothing left. They leave stronger, freer, ready to love and live without me, and I am left behind with a little less of myself each time. Like a quilt unraveling thread by thread, I fray at the edges. Each goodbye steals a piece of me, leaving me worn, raw, incomplete. My heart becomes a graveyard of offerings, a mausoleum of love I gave until it was gone. I’m haunted by the ghosts of all I sacrificed to make others whole.

I walk with their absences clanging like chains in my bones, with the borrowed light they carry snuffing out the blaze I once held. And maybe that is why the emptiness feels so endless, because I have become a cemetery of the versions of myself I sacrificed for others. A graveyard of tenderness, scattered across the lives of those who could never stay. This is the quiet horror of it, to be a living reliquary of loss. To know that I am scattered across strangers who never look back, that I have become less with every leaving. I am the husk, the hollow, the vessel drained dry. A well with no bottom, a candle flickering in a crumbling cathedral where no one comes to worship, where rain leaks through the broken roof and drowns the light I fought so hard to hold. I am scattered across the world in invisible threads, a haunting left behind in every life I tried to save, a testament to the love that always leaves me less than whole.

And still, if they returned, shattered, trembling, dragging the weight of their ruin behind them like a storm-dark cloak… I would still open my arms again. I would let them tumble into my harbor again and again. I would let their jagged edges cut into mine, let my own blood seep into their fractures until they could stand without crumbling once again. I would pour my light into the darkness they carry, press warmth into the cold, cracked places no one else dares to touch. I’d scatter my fragments like fire across the wounds they thought would never heal. Even knowing that when they rise whole, they will slip away again while I’m stitching myself back together. Even knowing they would once again leave me emptier, more frayed, more ghost than human… I would still do it all over. Every single time. Because this is the rhythm that beats in my chest. I’m meant to hold the broken, to cradle their ruin, to love so fiercely that it consumes me, even as it leaves me hollow…. even as it leaves me a vessel of echoes, bleeding into the dark.

I have been consumed, piece by piece, by the very souls I saved. Because I have been medicine, swallowed in desperation and abandoned as soon as the fever breaks. But never loved fully, never the sanctuary someone stays in once the healing is done. No one ever pours back into my vessel. My own cracks are never mended, the light I give never returned. I am left to gather the scattered fragments of myself, stitching together the edges they took with me alone, a vessel hollowed and haunted by the love I carry for everyone but myself. I’m a haunting, but never a home. And still, knowing the leaving is inevitable, knowing I will be hollowed again and again, I cannot stop myself. Even as I unravel, even as the emptiness spreads like a shadow through my bones, I will keep giving. I will keep pressing light into their wounds, keep pouring breath into their lungs. I will continue to offer pieces of myself to those who arrive to me broken. Because this is who I am… the fractured sanctuary, the flame, the ache that loves anyway.

I was made to resurrect what the world has tried to kill, even if it means I am the one left dying.