Part One — The One in My Kitchen

She calls herself the mother of my dogs.
I let her.
Some nights a house needs a name
for whatever's breathing in it.
But she reads my tablet like scripture.
Hunts another woman in the margins.
Finds a city instead.
Finds Atlanta humming in my messages,
a man pacing rooms he hasn't stood in yet,
and calls the blueprint a betrayal.
Ask me plain and I'd answer plain.
Instead she asks the glass.
I came home to my whole life unpacked.
Dishes in cabinets I didn't choose.
Boxes flattened, folded, gone —
every excuse I had to leave
put away where I couldn't find it.
She didn't ask.
That's the part.
A kindness with a hook in it,
a hundred small reasons to stay
arranged on my shelves like evidence.
Thank you. I mean it.
Now give me back my boxes.
She wants me risen and still in the room.
Wants ambition she can hold in her lap like a small dog.
Wants my dreams housebroken,
crated when company comes.
Says I'm distracted —
because a focused man is a man already halfway gone.
So the pins come out.
Little punctures in the balloon of me.
You ain't got your stuff together,
from a woman still hunting the instructions to her own.
Watch her face while I work.
I'm on my machine pulling ideas out of the air,
three tools open, building something,
and I can read her jaw tightening from across the room.
Not because I've hidden anything.
Because the thing I'm building doesn't have her name on it.
She wants me obsessed.
Then complains about a man who's obsessed.
Wants me global and keeps me local —
my reach the size of her living room,
my creativity licensed for one territory only,
renewable at her discretion.
Honey, then vinegar.
Honey, then onion and cold grease.
And if I say it's late, go home,
the fight starts.
She wants to come over.
She never knows when to leave.
So I've gone quiet.
Not peace — strategy.
Say nothing, and there's nothing to boomerang,
nothing she can hand back to me
labeled you started this.
I've seen this before.
Saw it in my mother's kitchen.
Love that shows up as a leash
and calls the leash devotion.
Wanting a man to win.
Wanting him nowhere when he does.
If you wanted me, you'd want the unfinished part.
You'd hand me the hammer.
You'd say go — and mean it —
and not check my screen while I went.
Then the body says stay.
I take her past the edge of herself
and she comes back confused,
like pleasure was a contract,
like I signed something in the dark
I don't remember signing.
I didn't.
So I'll tell you the truth.
I won't always tell you the plan.
Not lying — the plan was never up for a vote.
It moves whether you move or not.

Part Two — The One I Buried

Now the other one. The first one.
The one whose name I don't say anymore.
I'm not going back to Atlanta.
I'm going to Atlanta.
There's nothing behind me there.
Call it what it is: I was owned.
Signed my name to it three times
and called it love every time.
Wore the ring like a shackle
and thanked the woman who locked it.
I was a slave to love.
A slave to women.
I can't be that man again.
I don't think I can love like that anymore —
and I've stopped calling that a wound.
What she did was the ultimate betrayal.
Not a wrong turn. Not a rough patch.
The kind that rewrites everything before it.
And an apology wouldn't touch it —
there's no sentence in the language that reaches that far.
It was bruised, then broken,
then spit on, then set on fire,
and I watched it burn to the studs.
Trust doesn't scab over. It doesn't heal.
It was amputated.
So let it be on the record,
since I know who reads these:
beautiful, still.
Not mine, ever again.
I'm not coming home to anybody.
I'm coming to a city that never had my name in its mouth,
and I'm letting it learn me fresh.

Part Three — The Door

If that was the lease,
what's the mortgage?
So I look at Atlanta the way a man looks at a door.
I keep a door in every room I enter.
Not because I'm running.
Because I remember the cost of a room without one.
I can love you tonight
and still be gone by spring.
But she comes back at night.
Three nights running now,
choosing some other man in my sleep
while I stand there watching, sick with it.
Which is only the truth on rerun.
She did choose him.
Whatever her reasons were, they were hers.
Worked out or didn't — not my business either way.
And I wake up angry —
not at her.
At the version of me
who still had a reaction.
Because awake, I don't have one.
No jealousy. No attitude. Nothing owed.
She's not what I want.
She's not what's coming.
She's the past, and I don't drive looking backward.
Some part of the basement
hasn't gotten the memo yet.
It will.
The house is still mine.
Because I built this alone.
By grace — not by a woman's hand.
Every room I stand in, I earned.
So be everything they say you are.
Be the talk of your mother's house.
I still don't need you.
You helped build a man once.
Poured him, cured him, named him yours.
Go build another one.
Go find another Douglas, another Marlou,
another somebody who mistakes a leash for a wedding band.
That model's discontinued.
He's not sleeping. He's not away.
He's not coming back in three days
with the stone rolled off.
He's dead and I signed the paperwork myself —
not out of anger. Not out of fear.
By choice, on a Tuesday, calmly.
New creation.
No forwarding address.

- VillyMarlou