I Did

My heart and mind have never met each other.
One spends its days building exits.
The other keeps searching for evidence.
And I, unfortunately, belong to both.

Then the Mind arrives, evidence in hand
not memories, evidence.
Things that were said. Things that were done.
Things I had already forgiven,
because forgiveness demanded less than acceptance.

It lays them before me, one by one,
and asks quietly,
“How many times must the truth repeat itself
before you stop calling it an exception?”

I rarely answered.
The Mind has a habit of asking questions
it already knows I cannot survive.

Silence, I discovered, is not the absence of an answer.
It is the brief moment when neither side
knows how to prove itself.

Then the Heart spoke.
Not to deny a single word.
It simply waited until certainty had exhausted itself.

“You keep calling them evidence,” it said.
“I keep calling them moments.
Perhaps we are both telling the truth.”

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“Tell me,” the Heart continued,
“when you replay every goodbye,
do you also remember every reason they stayed?
When you count every wound,
do you also count every hand that tried to heal it?”

“Hope,” the Mind replied,
“has always been your favourite form of amnesia.”

They turned to me, waiting,
as if I were meant to choose a winner.

But no one asked the only question that mattered
what if both of them were destroying me?

For one quiet moment, under both their voices,
I wanted something neither of them was offering
not a verdict, not another chance
just a single day of not being cross-examined.

I spent years believing they were trying to protect me.
It took longer to understand,
protection was never the point.
The Mind wanted victory. The Heart wanted redemption.
Neither one wanted peace.

They were never protecting me.
They were only trying
to convince me
the other one
was dangerous.

Hope has always been your favorite form of amnesia.

And I
I became the place where they argued.
Neither of them had to live with the consequences.

I did.