Checkmate

“Checkmate”

You didn’t love me. You loved the game— the strategy, the positioning, every word a pawn, every silence a trap.

You played chess. I played soulwork. You mapped moves. I mapped energy.

But here’s the thing— I was never the pawn. I was the queen, and you didn’t even see it.

You called me paranoid. But I was tuned in. I felt the static before your lies made sound. I saw the cracks before the break. I just didn’t move fast enough. But now, I do.

You called me black and white— but that was you. Seeing life in winners and losers, right and wrong, yours or gone.

You mocked the stars I followed, laughed at the healing you greedily took. The meridian lines, the pressure points, the energy pathways I pressed with steady hands— realigning the chaos you brought into the room.

You loved the medicine. You just hated that it was mine.

You called me mercurial. I call it alive. I am the moon— waxing, waning, pulling tides whether you notice or not.

You called me promiscuous for refusing to wait while you kept me at arm’s length. You cut me loose and then blamed me for flying.

You threw words like knives— slut, crazy, broken, wrong. But I’m built of scar tissue now. Stretch marks. Cracked lines. Silver maps of every place I refused to fall.

You dangled houses, wills, deposits like bribes, but my worth was never up for auction.

I lost the clinic? No. I chose to leave it standing. Walked out— blood still rushing in my ears— with the furniture I paid for, and I filled my home with softness. With beauty. With the things that held me when you couldn’t.

You thought you broke me. But all you did was peel me raw— and I grew back stronger, softer, smarter.

Now?

I am tenacious. Resilient. The kind of beautiful that lives in scars, in stretch marks, in skin that’s been pulled thin and still holds.

I am Shiatsu hands, meridian maps, the flow of life beneath the skin. The breath that deepens. The river that still runs.

I don’t hate you. I don’t carry you. I left that weight right there on the cold clinic floor.

But I stand here now— whole, wild, and wide awake—

and I call it:

Checkmate.