From the Wound: Why I Stayed After the Cut
A Personal Essay by Noir Synn
You ever love someone so hard they hollowed you into a chapel?
Not a church. Not a sanctuary. A chapel — smaller, quieter, dimly lit, where incense masks regret and the pews creak beneath unfinished prayers.
That’s where I loved him. In the sacred space between silence and surrender. I gave him my altar and called it affection. He brought fire. I brought water. And I stayed to see which of us would survive the drowning.
Before the Fire wasn’t written in the moment he left. It was born in all the moments I stayed.
The mornings when I woke up to distance instead of arms. The nights when I chose softness while his silence curled itself into barbed wire beside me. The thousand small cuts I blessed as intimacy. The way I begged the flame to stop burning but kept feeding it pieces of myself as kindling.
We romanticize pain in women. We say she’s strong because she stays. We say she’s loyal because she bends. But there is a line — so faint and fine — between loyalty and self-abandonment. And I danced on it, barefoot, bleeding.
I wrote Before the Fire not because he left — but because I finally realized I had stayed too long.
Some wounds don’t split you open all at once. They kiss the same spot every night until the skin learns how to bleed without making a sound. I had grown fluent in bleeding quietly. There was a time I thought staying made me noble. That devotion was supposed to hurt. That love meant choosing them, even when they forgot to choose you back.
But what I’ve learned — what I am still learning — is that the kind of love that destroys you is not love. It’s possession. It’s familiarity. It’s the comfort of ache because at least ache is consistent. And consistency is seductive when you’ve been starved of it. He never read the poem. And maybe that’s the most honest line in the whole piece.
Because it wasn’t written for him. Not really. It was written for the version of me that needed to see the fire — and still chose to walk through it anyway. Before the Fire is a bruise that remembers. A mirror I held up to myself in a moment of clarity. A softness scorched into survival.
Maybe you’ve been there too. Maybe you’ve loved like that — fiercely, foolishly, faithfully. Maybe you’re still waiting for someone to choose you the way you keep choosing them. If you are… this essay, this wound, this fire — it’s yours now too. Ink-stained and ash-kissed,
— xoxo, S.🌹
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