The Dead Skin on My Lips: A conversation between a wife (F) and her husband (M)

F: The dead skin on my lips knows of you, my love. It carries the taste of every lie you coated with tenderness, just long enough for me to believe you had changed. It remembers the nights your voice grew sharp before your hands did, when your anger slithered across the room and wrapped itself around my breath. Yes, the dead skin on my lips has felt your touch, gribbled and crippled beneath the weight of a love that cracked open into something unholy. It knows the scent of the other woman who clung to your collar, the laughter trapped between your teeth when you thought I wasn’t listening. It knows you abandoned me long before you ever admitted it.M: The dead skin on my lips knows of you, love. Your softness, your beauty... your devotion. But it also knows the violence I never meant to become. It knows I was shaped by hands that taught me cruelty before they taught me affection. A boy forced into silence by an adult who stole what I never offered. A child blamed for what he survived. My lips learned to hold secrets they never asked for. My body learned to flinch at love and mimic harm. And I became what I feared, because I never learned another way to exist. This is not justification. This is the shame I carry in every breath.F: The dead skin on my lips knows the nights I tried to numb myself with fantasies of escape. It knows the taste of the man whose arms I borrowed, not for pleasure, but for forgetting. For a moment where I existed beyond your shadow. It knows how infidelity became the only language I had left to feel alive. Even sin felt safer than you.M: The dead skin on my lips knows my own crimes. The bottle, the slurred apologies, the fury that roared louder than my conscience. I thought the drink softened me, but it sharpened every edge. I thought it washed my pain away, but it poured it over you instead...and it also knows of the silent whispers of what I fear: what if you seek another to comfort you, to hold that curvy body, for your moans to become another’s.F: And in all this chaos, in all this ruin, there is our beautiful boy. Our son. Wide-eyed, silent, watching the storm that calls itself home. He learned early that footsteps can mean danger. That closed doors can hide screams. That love might arrive with bruises. He sees you stumble in reeking of liquor and other women’s perfume. He sees me packing rosaries of excuses into my throat, pretending the house isn’t collapsing. And he asks me, “Mama, why are you crying?” while you snore away demons you refuse to fight.M: He sees me... and I am ashamed. He sees me and I fear he is becoming me in the ways I have become my father, in the ways I never healed. He watches us like a mirror he did not ask for. A boy learning that a man can break the woman who feeds him. A boy learning that silence is safer than truth. And God, what terrifies me is that he might grow into my sins instead of my son.F: The dead skin on my lips has cracked enough to understand: this legacy must end. He deserves a home that doesn’t tremble at 2 a.m. A mother who is not always half-broken. A childhood that is not a rehearsal for trauma. So I will leave. For him. For the boy whose heart is still soft enough to reshape. For the man he might become if I do not run while I can still walk.M: And I... I know I have already lost you... but perhaps losing you is the only way I will learn to save him.F & M: The dead skin on our lips knows of us, the passion, the violence, the silence, the unravelling. It knows we cannot stay. It knows the ending arrived long before this poem.F: But ah, the skin is dead now, and I am finally shedding us.M: And I am left to face the boy I was so I can protect the boy we made.F & M: The dead skin on our lips knows everything. But the healing, the healing begins where we finally let go and begin seeking help.

The Dead Skin on My Lips: A conversation between a wife (F) and her husband (M)

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Namibian Sun 2026-01-07

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The Dead Skin on My Lips: A conversation between a wife (F) and her husband (M)

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Namibian Sun 2026-01-07

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