Amelia James Poetry

They tell me I’m overreacting,
As if my heart wasn’t shattered first.
The lies I swallowed,
The truth I second-guessed—
They smile, pretending they see the same,
But they don’t hear the echoes
Of words that never made sense,
Of promises that disintegrated like dust in my hand.

You told me to let it go,
But how do you let go of a storm that lives inside you?
The air thick with unspoken words,
The tension heavy, pressing in.
But they nod, convinced I’m imagining it—
As if I’m not the one who lived it.
As if I’m not the one left behind
Wondering where my peace went,
Wondering where my mind went,
While they simply “moved on.”

Your indifference makes me question everything,
As if my pain was never real—
And now, I am the crazy one.
You say, “You’re too sensitive,”
As if I wasn’t trained to feel this way,
Trained to believe I was nothing without him.
I was never enough—
But you still don’t see it, do you?

I’m suffocating in the shadows they cast,
But it’s not just his voice anymore.
Now, it’s theirs too.
Whispers, like smoke, drift through the air,
Lingering in places I can’t escape.
Secondhand smoke,
A poison I didn’t choose,
Seeping into my lungs,
Filling the spaces where truth used to live.
Telling me my truth doesn’t matter—
That what I felt wasn’t real.

They wonder why I can’t move on.
Why I keep looking for answers
In places that never existed.
But they’ve never seen the world
Through the lens of someone who’s been
Trained to doubt themselves.
I’ll never be free of the doubt
That they planted in my head,
Even if the love was never really love
And the apology was never really true.

I can’t breathe without them—
They tell me how to think,
What to feel.
I carry their words like a badge,
But it’s a badge of shame,
Worn in silence,
Hidden beneath layers of guilt.
They taught me to doubt,
To question what I knew.
Now I don’t know if I can trust anything,
Not even myself.

But maybe this time,
I’ll trust myself.
I’ll find my own light
And stop apologizing for the weight of it.
Maybe I’ll stop believing
That I was the one who lied.

-Amelia James