I count heartbeats in the dark.

One for survival. One for love. One for escape. One for staying.

Each beat, a choice I can’t make. Each moment, a war between what I need and what I can’t bear to lose.

The cruel truth? Joy and poison spill from the same source. Light and darkness live in the same eyes. Freedom tastes like hell. Because it means leaving the one pure thing in all this wreckage.

Some nights, I plan escapes. Route after route mapped in my mind, each one perfect—until I remember what it costs.

Each path to freedom is also a path to amputation.

And I freeze. Again. Always.

Choose yourself. Save yourself. Walk away.

But can you cut away half your heart and keep breathing?

Can you choose which dreams to murder?

Can you live in the aftermath of necessary devastation?

The bitter joke?

I’m already split.

Already broken.

Already less than whole.

Half of me is dying here. Suffocating. Shrinking smaller every day.

The other half has never been more alive. Never loved deeper. Never seen such light.

There is no clean cut. No surgical precision to this choice.

It’s all trauma. All tearing. All blood and bone and irreversible loss.

Choose the saw. Choose where it falls. Choose which part of yourself becomes sacrifice.

I look at maps until the night escapes. Research. Calculate. Plan new lives in careful, obsessive detail.

Then morning comes, and with it, pure joy wrapped in barbed wire.

A smile that makes everything worth it.

A laugh that chains me here.

Love that saves and damns in equal measure.

So I stay. Or I don’t. The choice remakes itself every morning, every breath a new decision between mutilations.

Is it braver to bleed out slowly or cut clean and fast?

Is it stronger to endure decay or embrace devastation?

Is it more loving to stay and watch your soul die, or go and kill the purest love you’ve known?

I don’t have answers. Just questions that echo in the dark. Just heartbeats counting time between decisions that will leave permanent scars.

One for survival.

One for love.

One for what could be.

One for what is.

The sun will rise soon. And I’ll choose again.

Or not choose.

Or choose not to choose.

Until the next heartbeat.

Until the next impossible morning.

Until I take up the saw.

Until the blade meets bone.

Until everything I am is left in pieces.