Act III — The Bruise and the Bloom
Some hurts don’t push you away.
They pull you closer.
Not because you enjoy the pain,
but because it’s the only place
that feels honest enough to hold you.
He is that kind of hurt.
Soft—
but only in the way a wound throbs
after being touched by the right hands.
Gentle—
but only in the way tenderness
can split you open
when you’ve spent years
learning how not to feel.
You don’t know when it started.
When the ache became comfort,
when the sharpness felt like clarity,
when the quiet pain of wanting him
felt safer
than the numbness you built your life around.
All you know is this:
You keep returning.
To the way your chest tightens
when he says your name.
To the way your breath trembles
when he looks at you long enough
to find the truth you’re trying to hide.
To the way his presence
lights up the shadows inside you
instead of chasing them away.
It shouldn’t feel good.
It shouldn’t feel right.
But it does—
that soft, aching pull
toward the one person
who touches the places in you
that never learned how to heal properly.
You tell yourself to stop.
To pull back.
To protect what’s left of you.
But the moment he reaches for you—
even with silence,
even with stillness,
even with nothing more
than the gravity of his existence—
your heart leans
before you can command it otherwise.
This is the hurt you choose.
The ache you don’t walk away from.
The wound you return to
because it feels more like truth
than anything else you’ve survived.
A soft hurt.
A familiar one.
A bruise that blooms
every time he looks at you
like he knows you’re already his.
Reading Trauma Mama: Velvet & Taboo 