Coliseum Love

*Author’s Note: This piece was written in a single sitting the night my marriage ended. May 31, 2022

When we first met, you sought a conquest
and I, a savior.
It was the only love either of us knew—
children of bullies, of the absent and the cruel.

Their affection was rationed, counterfeit,
conditional offerings after the wound.
We learned to feel only once bleeding,
our nervous systems raw,
our engagements brief.

We chased quick fixes—
distraction, self-loathing,
libations that burned like confession.
Our bodies took the beatings
while the children inside of us screamed.

We replayed the games that raised us,
believing mastery would mean freedom.
But the older we grew,
the deeper the pain rooted,
filling every inch of the shallow hall of fame
carved into our inherited names.

We swore we’d do better,
as though one sober season
could starve the monsters we kept feeding.
You bought your remedy,
I dismantled mine—
both prescriptions for forgetting.

The truth is simpler and crueler:
pain, when met instead of muted,
expands the heart’s capacity to love.
But only if we are willing to unlearn.

Unlearning is not a strike; it is a stare.
You become the observer,
lay down the sword,
and meet the beast in the mirror.
The beast your beloveds built
while they spun you in their orbit,
their Van Allen Belt of shame.

One by one, you cut the cords—
each severing a vow that was never yours.
And when the mirror clears,
the child behind the glass steps forward:
the savior you’ve searched for in every face.

It was never a person, place, or thrill.
It is the light that breaks your thoughts apart
so truth can breathe between them.

At dawn, memory re-threads itself.
New foundations form—
self-acceptance as architecture,
forgiveness as rebar.

The old teachers—Buddha, Krishna, Judas—
each point to the same communion:
the return to the inner temple.
Atonement is an anatomy lesson—
the fornix in the right hemisphere,
the bridge between recollection and release.

Kneel to that.
Not in shame, but in circuitry.
Let milk and honey become metaphor
for neurochemistry redeemed.
Let every breath be the quiet decree:
I will not inherit my pain;
I will transmute it.

And there, in the ruins of Coliseum Love,
where conquest once met salvation,
you rise—not healed, but whole.

End.

I wrote this the night my husband told me he wanted a divorce. At the time, I thought I was writing about heartbreak. About the collapse of a marriage. About addiction, grief, abandonment, and the strange psychic violence of watching a life you built suddenly lose structural integrity in real time. But years later, I understand the piece differently. It was not really about divorce. It was about recognition. More specifically, it was the first moment I consciously recognized that pain itself can become inherited architecture.

When people read the poem now, they often focus on the relationship itself — the “you” and “I” of it all — but the relationship was never actually the central subject. The real subject was conditioning. Two people unconsciously reenacting emotional climates they learned long before they ever met each other. “Children of bullies, of the absent and the cruel.” That line remains, to me, the true origin story of the relationship. Not because either of us were evil. Not because either of us consciously wanted suffering. But because humans often mistake familiarity for safety. That realization changed my life.

At the time I wrote the piece, I did not yet have the language I have now: nervous-system adaptation, trauma repetition, attachment conditioning, hyper-vigilance, emotional inheritance, somatic memory, or coercive relational dynamics. But the body understood before the intellect did. And perhaps that is one of the most misunderstood aspects of writing during collapse: people assume writing is expression. Sometimes it is orientation. Sometimes writing is the nervous system attempting to metabolize reality before the conscious mind fully catches up.

Looking back, I can see that the poem was my first attempt to stop romanticizing suffering long enough to observe it. “We replayed the games that raised us, believing mastery would mean freedom.” That line may be the emotional thesis of the entire piece. So many relationships are not formed through consciousness — they are formed through repetition. Through reenactment. Through the subconscious hope that if we replay the original wound differently enough this time, perhaps we can finally conquer it. But mastery is not freedom. Awareness is. That is why the piece eventually pivots away from blame and toward observation. “Unlearning is not a strike; it is a stare.” I still believe that. Modern culture often frames healing as war: fight harder, cut cords, destroy the ego, kill the old self,
burn everything down.

But genuine healing, at least in my experience, has been far quieter and far more uncomfortable than that. It has looked like: sitting still long enough to observe inherited pain without immediately anesthetizing it. No distraction. No performance. No savior. No conquest. Just witnessing. The references throughout the piece — Buddha, Krishna, Judas, neurochemistry, circuitry, the inner temple — were my early attempts to reconcile spirituality, psychology, biology, and memory into one coherent understanding of human suffering. At the time, I was beginning to understand that trauma is not just emotional. It is physiological. Relational. Neurological. Behavioral. Generational. The body stores what the mind cannot safely process yet. And many of us spend years trying to outrun symptoms that are actually messages. The poem mattered because it marked the first moment I stopped asking: “How do I save this relationship?” and started asking: “What inside me believed suffering was intimacy in the first place?”

That question reorganized my entire life. Once you begin observing the inherited systems beneath your choices, you cannot entirely return to unconsciousness. The poem ends with: “You rise—not healed, but whole.” That distinction still matters deeply to me. I no longer believe healing means becoming untouched by grief, contradiction, rage, longing, or memory. I think wholeness is something different. Wholeness allows integration. It allows complexity. It allows the self to survive transformation without requiring perfection. And perhaps that is the real purpose writing served for me during that season. Not escape. Not catharsis. Not even closure. Coherence. Enough coherence for the self to survive the collapse without disappearing inside it entirely.