I keep waiting for you to leave.

I look for it, the look he has embedded in his eyes, the frown lines nailed to his forehead as if he constantly wonders why I’m his. I search for it in your touch: it being the absent loving touches he fails to bless my mother with, his calloused palms seemingly peeling off bits of my sanity instead. It’s how each year, brings my mother reminding me to remind him that I was born on the ninth of the ninth month of the year. Part of it has to do with how he seems alive around them, and how he goes pale and retreats back into himself in the presence of the very family he created.

I keep waiting for you to leave because of the day he pulled my body along (drained of life at the sight of the emptiness that lay where his love for my mother my sister and I, ought to have been) I saw how he cared even less as the cold walls collided with my body.

I keep waiting for you to leave because what worth is a daughter who he refuses to accept as said daughter?

I keep waiting for you to leave because he has never thought me special enough to stay for.

The scars that refuse to leave the warmth of my wrist are the same scars he saw and brushed off without even asking where they came from, and I’m quite sure that even if he were armed with the knowledge that they’re because of him he’d just keep pulling the trigger.

I keep waiting for you to break my heart because I know that nothing could possibly break me more than what my his existence has.

I keep waiting for the words to leave your lips as you stare at the devastation that the hurricane that was him caused in the deepest cities of my being. All the hope and life that resided in those cities will never be regained. The towers of faith in myself never rebuilt. All I am is rubble, and who am I to ask you to clean up a mess you had no part in creating ?

I keep waiting for you to leave because I fail to see why you would want to stay when all that I am is a threat to the human that still breathes in you.