Hold her like she is the whole world. Do not let her breathe too freely. Do not let her take breaths that are too long. Let her know that something is still holding onto her, something that is not yet ready to let the dead fall asleep.

She is slipping away. Her soft hands have begun to grow rough beneath my touch. Will I be brave enough to give them some life. Her beautiful red hair has begun to lose its fire. Should we go and touch it up? Let me take her away for a second.

She keeps rrefusing everything, here, let me help.

Please.

She remains quiet. I have grown desperate for the sound of her voice, desperate to hear her sing along to her favourite songs again. She is too stubborn to give me even the grace of her words anymore. Every conversation just goes unanswered .

Does she even hear me anymore?

The sunlight shines brightly through her soft orange curtains. It paints her otherwise pale skin with a warmer shade, making her look almost alive. She looks more vivid during the days when the sun reaches her. I like her in the morning glow. Afterall, she is my sunshine, my light through the darkness.

When did she begin to grow so dim?

My guiding light has been losing its radiance for some time now. I watched it happen slowly, quietly, as though I could pretend not to notice.

It is a bitter sight, watching the thing that once guided you begin to dull.

Her eyes, once filled with stars, have begun to collapse. I have never witnessed a meteor shower quite like the one in her cloudy gaze.

My own eyes have become a downpour. I seem to know how to do little else but sit beside her and talk for endless hours. I would not even call it a conversation. It is more like foolish, desperate ranting, words spilling into the silence in the hope that somewhere among them, an answer might find its way back to me when it might actually never arrive.

She has even stopped listening to music nowadays, which is ironic, because she never truly woke up without music announcing the rise of the sun, nor did she ever let the day fall into darkness without something playing in the background.

She recommended so many songs to me. Insisted that I listen to them. Well, I did.

I just never paid enough attention to understand what she was really telling me.

It was never just music. It was her way of speaking when words were not enough. It was her heart, poured cleanly into the hands of a clueless, dense person who never seemed to realize that there were other perspectives beyond what was said.

Let the dead sleep, let the living be allowed to live.

But she is still alive, so why does she keep insisting on staying asleep? I too am breathing, yet I do not want to be allowed the privilege of living.

Let me breathe, or take it all away. She won't let me have it either way. How self-serving of her to expect me to keep my lungs filled with air while she lets hers run out of it as she pleases.

Deny me mercy or Strangle my lungs, melt my eyes or deafen my ears. Do not ask me, please, to let the dead sleep and the living live.

Leave me hanging on the rope of the agony between them.

For she is neither truly gone nor truly here, and I am neither truly living nor willing to let myself die inside the silence she leaves behind.

So what am I supposed to do with this breath?

What am I supposed to do with all this life?

How am I supposed to let the dead sleep when the dead are still breathing, and how am I supposed to let the living live when living means watching her disappear?

Leave me here.

Let me hang in between.

I choose to be selfish, just as she is, and hold her tightly enough to not let her fall deep into her dreams, always aware that yes, she is being held, and not yet abandoned enough to rest as she pleases.

Perhaps that is my own kind of irony.

She refuses to wake up completely, and I refuse to let her fall asleep.

So we remain suspended between the two of us, neither willing to let go, neither awake enough to call it living.

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Many of the problems we face today are problems we created ourselves. Hierarchies, social classes, systems of power, they didn't appear out of nowhere. We built them. At some point, we decided that some people were worth more than others, that some deserved power while others deserved less. 

But why? Why did we create a system so deeply flawed that we now spend generations fighting against it? If human intelligence is our greatest evolutionary achievement, why has it led us to design a world that so often works against the very people living in it?

We have built entire civilizations from the same atoms that make up everything else in the universe. Wi-Fi, computers, airplanes, satellites name almost anything, and most of us couldn't explain how it was invented or who first imagined it. Yet these creations have become so ordinary that we barely question them.

There was once a time when people dreamed about flying cars, believing they were the future. Even without them, we already live in a world that would leave someone from a few centuries ago completely overwhelmed.

We carry devices that let us speak to people across the globe in seconds, store entire libraries in our pockets, and send machines beyond our planet. To someone from the past, it would probably look like magic. If they called us witches, they wouldn't be entirely wrong.

Children today are often introduced to concepts at ages that would have surprised previous generations. As education continues to expand, expectations rise alongside it. More people struggle to keep up, not necessarily because they lack potential, but because the system keeps demanding more. 

Too often, academic achievement becomes the measure of a person's worth, and those who don't fit that standard are made to feel as though they have less value.

Why have we made intelligence such a defining measure of success?

Somewhere along the way, it seems we've begun rewarding the ability to memorize, compete, and outperform more than the ability to imagine, create, or think differently. In chasing intelligence as the ultimate goal, have we allowed creativity to slowly fade into the background?

If human intelligence is the goal we celebrate so fiercely, why has it made life so much more complicated? Why has the same intelligence that allowed us to reshape the world also created systems that so many people struggle to survive in? At times, it feels as though we've built a society that resembles a dystopia of our own making.

We call ourselves the most intelligent species on Earth, yet we continue to make decisions that harm one another, exploit the planet, and create problems we then spend generations trying to solve.

Perhaps intelligence isn't just our greatest strength, it is also our greatest burden. It has become so powerful that, in many ways, we have turned it into a cage of our own making.

Evolution doesn't favor intelligence for its own sake; it favors whatever helps a species survive. Yet modern society often treats intelligence as the highest virtue, putting it on display as though it alone determines a person's worth.

We are taught more than any generation before us. Our minds are filled with facts, formulas, and theories, but knowledge alone does not guarantee survival. If it did, so many people wouldn't leave school feeling unprepared for the realities of adult life.

Schools, colleges, and universities teach us how to pass examinations, yet many students graduate without knowing how to manage their finances, understand legal rights, navigate healthcare, communicate through conflict, or cope with the responsibilities of everyday life.

We spend years mastering subjects that may never become part of our lives while receiving little guidance on the skills we rely on every single day.

If intelligence is meant to help us survive, then why do so many of our systems reward the accumulation of information rather than the ability to live well?

Take scientists, for example. They are often regarded as some of the most intelligent people in the world, and their discoveries have transformed medicine, technology, and nearly every aspect of modern life. Yet intelligence, when driven solely by curiosity or ambition, can also carry consequences.

Throughout history, scientific progress has sometimes come at a tremendous cost. Animals have been used in experiments, ecosystems have been altered, and people have been exposed to risks in the pursuit of knowledge.

Not every experiment succeeds, and not every breakthrough arrives without ethical questions. The desire to discover something new can push humanity to test boundaries that perhaps should never have been crossed.

This is not to say that science is the problem. It has saved countless lives and continues to do so. But intelligence without restraint can become dangerous. The question is not whether we should keep learning, it is whether our ability to ask can we? has begun to outweigh our willingness to ask should we?

Perhaps evolution did not make a mistake by giving us intelligence. Perhaps the mistake was allowing intelligence to evolve faster than wisdom. We learned how to reshape the world long before we learned how to live responsibly within it.

If evolution rewards survival rather than happiness, perhaps intelligence succeeded exactly as nature intended. The real question is whether humanity has become intelligent enough to survive its own intelligence.

P.S. Originally published by matiaswabisabi on insta. Read the original post here.

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Lately I've been really thirsty for water. I crave it. I wake up in the middle of the night just to have it, wake before the sun for it too. My mouth dries, my throat aches, and all I can think about is water.

But I don't drink much.

No matter how parched I am, no matter how greed consumes me for just one sip, I can't swallow more than three sips.

One.

Two.

Three.

Any more and it feels like my throat will tear itself apart.

I've never liked water this much. It had always been nothing more than a requirement, another tedious thing I had to do to keep myself alive. I only ever reached for it when I truly, truly needed it.

Now I think about it constantly.

Ice-cold. Colder. Cold enough to make my teeth ache, my tongue go numb, my throat seize around it. I want it freezing. I want it to burn with cold. I want every swallow to sting, to leave my chest hollow with that sharp, aching chill.

Yes.

Just like that.

Just one sip.

Then another.

Then I stop.

Still thirsty.

I'm tired. Leave it. It's fine if I don't go and have water.

Go.

Go.

Go drink.

I drink one sip, two, three. Stop. Four. Now I've ruined it. My throat hurts, I can feel it becoming sore. I should stop. I don't want to stop. It feels good passing down, so cold it almost hurts. I should stop.

No, just one more sip. One more sip, that's all. Then another, because that wasn't enough. It never is. My throat burns now, every swallow scraping against it, but I keep reaching for the glass as if the next sip will finally satisfy whatever this is.

Water... it's placed right where my mother sleeps. Water, she almost always asks for a glass whenever I grab a bottle. She's more sophisticated than me, doesn't drink it unless it's in a glass. I don't care about that. I'll drink it straight from the bottle, standing half asleep, hair a mess, eyes barely open.

I'm too much of a contradiction to her choices.

Water. She likes it in the perfect balance between hot and cold, mostly stays away from a sip too cold. Says it'll hurt her throat. It hurts mine too... What nonsense.

I always remain desiccated, she says. Still you remain so...

"So what?" I never really hope, or want, to know the rest of the sentence. Brittle. She always finishes it anyways.

Water. It keeps me full a lot. I can't seem to eat much anymore. She laughs a lot. Mostly at my pathetic intake of something she's aware I can't seem to wrestle with.

Don't you, my dear?

"No."

"I don't. I really can't.."

I don't enjoy the state of it. If I let my greed be fulfilled, it makes me sick. Water... it's never tasteless when it leaves my mouth. There's always something left behind, something that keeps me reaching around. To wash off the acid off my tongue, "can I have some more, please?"

"Water."

"If you share water from the same glass, it raises the reasoning of the heart."

What? She would ask. "Nothing."

"Water?" Yes, she says.

I bring her a glass. "Half of it spilled." Fill it up again, then. "Oh. Alright". Here, have as much as you can.

I meant to give it all to her. I held the glass, thinking of the heart's reasoning. Then I drank, one sip, two. It spilled. Did it? Yes, it did. It spilled into me.

Water. I can't have much of it. A glass filled to the brim is almost a dream, too unrealistic to ever become anything more than one.

Mother likes to complain that she's not getting enough water, I think, with how much water she drinks, her veins must swim with the ocean instead of her body.

Jealous? She would say.

"How can I be?" What a weird thing to ask..

Water? "No, I'm not thirsty enough."

I never did like the glass of water she kept beside her bed. Always too warm, how does it even go down her throat without her getting sick. How can cold water go down your throat without being scratched? "I dont know, I suppose I never did find the time for such a thought.."

Mother doesn't ever seem to get as sick as me, though. Unfair. Water, it never makes her desperate. I'd say it rather keeps her in good health, her mind fresh. Her voice smooth until I ask her for..

Water? "No thanks. I can't seem to digest it very well at the end."

My mind becomes a lightwave when it hits too much. Shit, isn't water supposed to keep you up? It spills across my head, makes my brain struggle against the waves. No, it won't stop until I have a taste again.

Water?

No.

Not water.

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Whisper it into my ear when the world grows quiet. Then tell me again in front of everyone, as if loving the way I exist is the most natural thing you've ever done.

Tell me what you notice. Tell me my eyes catch the sunlight in a way that makes you look twice. Tell me my laugh lingers in your mind long after I've gone. Tell me what steals your breath for a second, what makes your heart stumble, what makes you forget the next sentence the moment you look at me.

Don't make me search for affection between the lines.

If you think I'm pretty, tell me. Tell me you love the way I dress. Tell me which color lingers on me the longest, which one makes you look twice. Look into my eyes and confess the thoughts your heart only dares to have after midnight.

Tell me the little things. Does the white liner make my eyes shine brighter? Do I look prettier with my hair falling over my shoulders, or twisted into a careless knot? Tell me which version of me follows you home after I've gone.

When you look into my eyes, does something inside you change? Does your heartbeat forget its rhythm? Do your hands grow restless? Do you wait for me to look away first, hoping I'll surrender before you do? And when you win that silent little battle, does it leave a smile on your lips for the rest of the day?

If you think I'm pretty, don't make me wonder. Tell me every little thing you've noticed. I want to know the version of me that exists only in your eyes.

Tell me how I look when sleep begins to find me. Is it beautiful? Does it make you want to memorize the quiet of my face before dreams carry me away? Make you want to hold me?

Tell me which version of me you love most. The one who smooths every strand of hair into place, or the one who forgets to be graceful altogether? Do you like me polished, or do you find something beautiful in the moments I come undone?

Tell me what you see when I'm angry. Does the fire in my voice unsettle you, or does it help you understand me? And when I break, when my strength slips through my hands and I no longer know how to hold myself together, does something inside you break a little too?

If you think I'm pretty, don't let your eyes be the only thing that loves me. Tell me about the places no mirror has ever reached, the corners where my kindness sleeps, the rooms where my anger keeps its keys.

Tell me when my pride begins to sound like truth. Call me back before I wander too far into myself. Correct me like you're holding a candle, not a knife.

Know when to meet my fire, and know when to let it burn itself to ash. I have never needed someone at my feet, only someone unafraid to stand beside me.

When my voice forgets its softness, don't raise yours. When my lungs mistake panic for breathing, take my hand and lend me yours. When I unravel, be the quiet that waits for the thread.

Don't build my world for me. Don't bleed just to prove you care. Save your heroics for stories.

Just stay.

If you think I'm pretty, be afraid to touch. Keep me at a distance only your thoughts are allowed to cross. Don't let your hands betray what your heart has hidden for so long.

Don't make me search for it in borrowed glances or linger too long over the way your eyes found mine. Don't leave me wondering whether admiration ever passed through your mind, only to disappear before it reached your lips.

Don't leave my thoughts wandering the shape of your silence, stitching confessions from words you never said.

If you think I'm pretty, you might as well confess a secret.

Tell me which part of me followed you home.

Tell me what made your breath hesitate.

Tell me whether it was my smile, my eyes or simply the terrible misfortune of meeting me at all.

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While we are alive, our flaws are noticed, our mistakes remembered, and our efforts taken for granted. Yet when we are gone, people suddenly speak of our kindness, our strength, and the quiet ways we touched their hearts.

Why is it such a difficult task for us to express ourselves, to spit out the words our minds are begging us to let go of when we were made to speak, to let go of everything that weighs us down?

Why do we find it so hard to say what we really, deeply want to confess, simply because of the fear of judgement or rejection? “Is it better to speak or to die?” It should not even be a comparison to begin with.

I mean, I do know what it feels like when you need to tell someone something so important, so special, that it feels as if you will simply pass out if you let the words escape.

But at the end of the day, we always make it out, don’t we? We survive the vulnerability, the uncertainty, and whatever answer comes after. So why do we keep choosing silence when the things left unsaid often weigh far heavier than the words themselves?

What good is it to tell someone how special they are, how beautiful, how important, how bright they are in your eyes, after the light in theirs has already disappeared?

As humans, we live for words, for care, for the slightest acknowledgment that yes, we are being seen, that we are not alone, that we can survive even when the whole world has gone dim.

When the lights cut off, even the tiniest flicker can lead one home. A single word, a simple act of kindness, a reminder that someone cares can be enough to keep a person going.

Yet we save our gentlest words for eulogies, our deepest admiration for gravestones, and our loudest praise for those who can no longer hear it. Why do we wait until someone is gone to give them the very things they may have needed to stay?

I myself am somehow a hypocrite in this matter, if I must confess. I hold just as many unsaid things, so many letters written to names I have never been brave enough to actually send. I do wonder what it would be like if I finally did.

Would I finally feel my heart lighten? Would it beat a little faster, or would it slow down? Would I become better because I had finally let go of the things and words that will always haunt me, no matter how far ahead I go? Or would I finally become honest enough to smile wide and bright?

Perhaps that is what scares me the most, not rejection, not judgment, but the possibility that after carrying these words for so long, I would no longer know who I am without them. Yet a part of me still wonders if freedom has always been waiting on the other side of simply pressing send.

When did feelings become such secretive things? When did we lose the ability to be honest and let ourselves breathe? Why do we overcomplicate words that were meant to be held gently? Why do we wrap them in fear until they become heavy enough to suffocate us?

Why do we hold back confessions as if they are something ugly and painful, only revealing them when the other person’s world has already become ugly and painful, when they have long forgotten how to breathe? Why do we suffocate ourselves to the point of grief and pain? What good are words when they never reach the ears they were meant for?

I want to hear those confessions that people hold for me, the ones they will let go of on the day of my funeral and afterwards. I don’t want to hear the barest of words like “I care” or “you matter.” I want the deepest, rawest hate, love, regret, and pain you hold. I want to hear the vengeance, I want to hear how and why you care, why I matter, what I mean to you.

Love that cannot be felt has to be expressed, otherwise how can one know that they are something to you? What good is your love if the other person has to die for it to finally be spoken aloud? What good would my words be if I hold them until either I or they are no longer able to say or hear them? Why must we suffer when we can simply take a deep breath and speak?

What comes after will be better than dying with the knowledge that you were unable to say something you felt so deeply. Be bold, for once, and let yourself breathe.

​

From a young age, I knew this much: I wasn't well. Not physically; I was healthy in every measurable way. Except for that one lingering grave at the back of my mind, the part of me that craved sickness. An injury. A diagnosis. Something serious enough to make my suffering visible.

The urge was never magnetic enough to consume me, but it was persistent enough to leave a mark. A backhanded certainty that no matter how far I drifted from it, I would eventually circle back to the same desire: to be sick.

Maybe then I would finally earn the strange fascination I held with illness. Maybe then I would receive the attention from "home" that I so desperately, and disgustingly, wanted.

I often wondered whether people would have looked at me differently if I had been sicker. Not just ill, but seriously wounded. The fascination had never appeared out of nowhere. Whenever I got sick, I waited for something that never seemed to arrive. A softer voice. Gentler hands. A little more care.

So I began to think that perhaps I simply wasn't sick enough.

Maybe if I had broken an arm, someone would have brushed my hair and woven it into a neat braid. Maybe meals would have been brought to me instead of left for me. Maybe someone else's hands would have fed me. 

The fantasies were never really about hospitals or diagnoses. They were about being handled with a tenderness I couldn't seem to earn any other way. That was the root of it. 

Home is the architect, the first place you learn how to leave. It is the rawest emotion you will ever experience: a collision of sickening hatred, shattering sorrow, and ecstatic laughter. It is love before it learns how to behave. The ugliest form of love.

​

Walls press lessons into your bones: swallow yourself, vanish before the ceiling crushes you. Floors remember your silent defeats. Doors teach escape before survival. Arms never held you, rooms never kept you, and still your body aches for them, for warmth that was never yours.

​Home was never home. It was the blueprint of absence.

The place that taught me longing was the only thing I would ever inherit. Despite all this, I still craved that place. Home. It even sounds warm, doesn't it?

​

But home was never a decided thing for me, never a definite place.

Sometimes it was warmer than a kitchen after dinner, deceptively right. Other times, it was the bitterest thing I had ever tasted. I liked the bitterness; maybe I even came to crave it.

Sweetness sickened me to my core, made me want to spill my guts out. I never could tolerate cloying or heavy tastes or scents, perhaps because they lingered all too long within the narrow spaces of that house.

There was, once, a passion for color in my life. Something personal. Something that belonged only to me. I remember tearing it from my room with my own hands, stripping the walls bare as if I could uproot that part of myself along with it.

It shattered my little heart to rip the art from walls already too old to hold much weight. 

Drawings I had spent hours on covered every inch of them. They were good too. I had felt so proud of them, recieved attention for them. An identity. There was hardly any breathing space left between the pages.

Pride, that was what those papers had carried. So many colors, so much life. 

Looking back, it seemed impossible that they had belonged to me at all. The room had once felt vibrant. Now the memory of it overwhelms me. I think I would grow dizzy staring at that much life.

I couldn't see straight that hour; a haze was lodged in my head, a dull certainty that I needed to punish myself. And so I did, tearing the joy right out of my once-colourful lens.

"I wish you had never been born." "I have grown to hate you."

Those sentences always sounded like clichés to me. The sort of things people said in stories, too cruel to survive outside them. Then they were said to me.

Perhaps that was where the certainty came from. If someone could feel that much hatred toward me, then surely I had done something to deserve it. The drawings became collateral. So did everything else I loved.

That was the end of an era, the last time I ever used crayons or colors. I guess the memory stayed with me because of what came after: how I tried to tape the ripped pages back together, as if that could repair me.

Neither the pages were fixed, nor I. I never reached for color again. Now that I think about it, that might have been the last time I did.

After that, everything became territorial. Every interest I picked up had to belong to me completely. It wasn't enough to enjoy something; I needed to be known for it. To be the best at it. The only one doing it.

The moment someone else shared the same interest, the same choice, something in me recoiled. The thing no longer felt mine. The attachment soured. I would move on and begin searching again. A part of me would lose more of the little passion I hold.

From the outside, it probably looked self-centred. Maybe it was. Maybe it is. But beneath it was something smaller and far less confident: the fear of being ordinary, of being interchangeable. I was always searching for something no one could take from me. A talent. A passion. An identity.

Something I could point to and say, this is mine.

I never tried to escape in any real sense. The unbearable heat of that place always left me burned, yet somehow I always found my way back to point zero. It became a place of habit. The only place I ever tried to escape by returning to it.

​

There were times when it all felt so euphoric that I wanted to be engraved into the moment itself, for my time to end right there and nowhere else. Most of the time, though, it was chaos. A chorus of voices so loud, so hurtful, that they crushed you into something paper-thin. Tearful, or already torn. There was never an in-between.

Family was a music player that had broken long ago but was never discarded. An heirloom passed from hand to hand, destructive then, destructive now, and perhaps destined to remain so. No one was sane enough, or well enough, to throw the heirloom away. To end it.

Inheritance had always wished for sickness across generations. The craving lingered in the walls of its choice, seeped through its bloodlines, settled into its bones. Yet no one was kind enough to put an end to that hunger.

Home was vengeful in ways that first felt sweet. Honeyed enough to keep you reaching for more, until the sweetness sickened you.

​

Until you looked around and realised you had already become part of the rot.

It would have been easier if someone had given it a name. A diagnosis. Something pitiful enough.

Instead, It remained what is always was, a system that remained stable by feeding on its own instability.

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It was a strange feeling, being reduced from a letter meant to be kept to a note meant only to pass through hands. It began without hesitation, words pouring out freely, until they didn’t.

As if language itself abandoned me, the confession faltered, collapsing into something smaller, something temporary, a note, crumpled and thrown away once read.
___

The light that crowned me dissolves. The streets warp beneath my feet. My pulse stutters, a rhythm I can’t keep. I am everywhere and nowhere, a comet burning bright for others but vanishing for myself. Even my thoughts betray me now, they don’t sound like mine anymore. They drift, they bend, they refuse the certainty they once carried.

The laughter that once echoed around me is starting to sound distant. It moves too fast, crossing the space between us before I can follow. And somewhere beneath it, beneath the smiles, a dark coil tightens, whispering that I am nothing more than the hollow afterglow of a brilliance no one can see.

It feels as if I’m trapped in a film strip slowly fading, captured by a camera long since abandoned. Meanwhile, the pictures surrounding me burn brighter, shifting with time, alive and steady, as if eternity itself chose them to remain.
___

The voices that once lived close to my ears and heart have shifted. Some sharpened, some brightened, some faded into distance. Mine grew louder, but still it is the least heard. The others speak with ease now, with certainty, with confidence. Mine refuses to follow, and every time I try to force it, my throat tightens.


They once called me the brightest star. I think I burned too brightly, the flames turned on me and consumed me whole. What I once wore with pride has become something I can barely stand, a fading echo that haunts me. It poisoned everything, stripped me down to a single relentless need, to burn that bright again, to be held in that light, to be looked at with that kind of pride.

It feels like suffocation, watching everyone else move so easily, unburdened, as if connection is not something to struggle through. They talk, they laugh, they fall in love like it is second nature.

And I can’t help but wonder if it really is that simple, or if I am the one making it impossible. But then I catch myself, how am I supposed to recognize love when I’ve never truly known it? All I’ve known is the brief spark of pride after doing something right, something earned, something that fades.
___

Each day I grow older, more tired, more alone. There is an itch in me to reach out, to be found, but it never gets fulfilled, nor does it quiet itself. It only returns, sharper each time. Everyone else keeps moving, crossing every threshold set before them.

I’m still standing at the first, unsure how to step through. My vision dims. My dreams shrink into something small, something distant, something I’m almost ashamed to hold onto.

“Will I ever—”

It is a question that rings through me constantly. I always seem to have an answer, but it never lasts, only brief moments of peace or distraction. This feeling of never quite reaching anything eats at me. Always behind. Always a step late, sometimes more, never ahead.

It makes me want to push away the few people I still have. It makes me want to escape. But where would I even go? Where does anyone go when they feel trapped in something that never ends?

The question always lingers, unfinished, echoing through everything I am. Maybe it will never leave. Maybe I will always be searching for something just out of reach. But even in that, in the repetition, in the exhaustion, there is proof that I haven’t gone entirely quiet. Something in me is still asking, still reaching, even if I don’t yet know how to arrive and maybe I never will find it out.
___

“The brightest star” was the quickest title given to shatter my soul and hopes. The moment that brightness started to fade, so did the only thing I knew and held onto.

Once the light began to slip from my palms and my being, I became clueless, like a newborn. The guilt followed, along with constant pressure and the hopelessness of failing those self set expectations, the prideful eyes, the hope filled praises, the joy of success.

The brightness burned it all away, along with the simple joys of life. And now I stand in what remains, trying to understand what I am when nothing is left to prove.

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Each tiny lift, each curling edge became a signal I couldn’t ignore, a quiet betrayal under my own gaze, distracting me, reminding me of you cutting threads piece by piece.


My hair tangles into chaos, my mind knotted tighter, and the pale sun slips through the blinds, a silent witness to how I’ve stopped reading and choosen sleep. I never did crave the warmth of morning, never lingered beneath its quiet glow, preferring the moon’s soft dominion. Yet even that... lying beneath silver stars, breathing their light, feels like a memory I’ve let drift away. I seem to have forgotten what it is to be alive, to exist quietly in the world.

___

I can feel the distance growing between us… you, the sun, radiant and unyielding, and I, the moon, tethered to your orbit, only ever able to rise when you retreat. We never rose together. One of us always had to drift, surrendering to shadow, so the other could claim the sky. And in that endless cycle, I watch you blaze, and I fade... forever luminous, forever apart.


The apartment smells of old coffee and stillness, thick and unyielding, pressing into my chest like it knows every secret I’ve tried to hide. The radio hums a song I once carried inside me, a thread I thought would never fray. I hum along softly, a fleeting smile flickering, until the notes stumble, the words unravel, and the melody dies midair. Just like that, the tune collapses, leaving only silence behind, and I am left listening to the ghost of a tune I can no longer hold..       
___

I move through the rooms like a ghost, fingertips brushing surfaces that feel foreign, tracing shapes that were never mine. I pass a wall of picture frames, too surreal to have ever been captured, and a warmth blooms in my chest as memories ripple through me, almost a hallucination, if it weren’t for the way your gaze had once locked onto me, as though I were the whole story...

But I was never meant to stay; I was a poem, fragile and fleeting, held only once, now echoing through the empty space around me, haunting me as much as I haunt it.


Dust hangs in the light, a silent witness to the hours I’ve lost, threading the shattered sky. I drag a chair across the scraped wood; the scattered noise steadies my breath. I tiptoe toward the anchor reaching for the sun, my dress swaying with the wind spilling through the window left ajar. I kiss the dust away, and for a moment, my eyes seem to sparkle with the room itself, catching the scattered light like fragments of something forgotten.

___

There’s a drifting scent clinging to the breath of the apartment, its notes so soft, so fleeting, it feels like a whisper of wind through empty rooms. I draw it in slowly, letting it fill my lungs, and my heart begins to ease the anxiety lodged deep within me lifting, rising with the invisible threads of its memory.

It is an unreachable scent, one I can never reclaim, yet I hold it close for just a moment longer, letting it drift through me, through the walls, until it fades into the air, savoring its ghost before it vanishes.
___

I reach for my pen, and suddenly a deep, devouring urge to write overtakes me. About what? A thought never begun, a ghost not yet named. I flip through my journal, searching for a blank canvas to hold it, to give form to something I’m not sure exists.

The scent of ink and paper rises, mingling, and nostalgia hits me like a wave, sharp and aching. My eyes grow wet without my noticing, until a raindrop falls onto the page, and the ink trembles, drifts, blurring the lines between memory and dream, between what I hold and what slips forever away.

My pen drifts across the page on its own, spilling words I cannot fully claim, some sinking to the ground, some rising toward the sky, carried by an unseen wind. My hands move with them, fluid and effortless, as if I am only a vessel. Tears streak across the paper, erasing the trace of every secret cast into oblivion, yet they leave a shimmer behind, like stardust caught in shadow.

Slowly, my eyes begin to pale, echoing the moon’s cold glow, my lips unravel, crooked, desperate, elated, a trembling hymn to something lost and found.
___

I pause in the center of the room and notice the quiet ways the apartment has changed while I drifted. The mug I left on the counter weeks ago has a thin ring of dust at its base. A single thread of moonlight catches on a crack in the floorboard, glimmering like it’s holding a secret just for me.

For a moment, I feel both the weight of absence and the strange comfort of constancy. These small, stubborn details have endured without me, silent witnesses to everything I thought I lost. And in noticing them, I realize that even when threads break and stars fade, some fragments persist, waiting for me to reclaim them.

___

Small fragments of myself cling by the night, but the rest drift away, unraveling quietly into shadows where no one can follow... a cold, ecstatic forgetting, flowing like water through the spaces we once shared.


Yet somewhere beneath it all, a faint, insistent flicker remains: I should redo my nail polish. Perhaps red this time... a vivid, defiant smear against the pale yellow of your sun, too vivid to let another shine alongside it. In the quiet light, the color becomes a small ritual, a whisper of myself lingering in the room, in the air, in the fading glow, a defiance alive even as everything else drifts away.

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She stood there breathing in shallow, uneven pulls, like the air itself had turned against her, as if the wind was slowly taking her away. The room felt smaller with every passing second, the walls leaning in, patient and silent. Anyone watching might have thought the same thing : she must want very much to die.

A strange thought to have just by looking at someone… and yet it felt disturbingly right, as if the words had been waiting for her long before she ever stepped into the room.

Because it was the only expression that matched the way she looked, like a trapped animal that had finally understood there was no escape. Beyond the fragile circle of light waited only the slow, patient dark, the way a deer stands frozen in the dazzling eyes of an unfamiliar creature, in the quiet instant before its world fades into a single, unmoving line.

The darkness pressed close around her, heavy and patient, like a witness that had seen too many endings. Her hands trembled, her gaze flickering wildly from wall to wall. She looked almost insane.

And yet there was something strange about the way she stood in the middle of the rush... something uncanny. As if she were a creature that had already crossed some invisible threshold, something that had already transcended… and yet was still here, whole, breathing, alive yet dead.

___
“You have the look of a creature caught in iron jaws, breathing slowly, waiting for the final mercy of the dark,” a passing man had murmured.

She didn’t seem to notice. Or perhaps she did, it was impossible to be certain.

It was a strange thing to say, almost predatory in its imagery. And yet he had spoken it with such quiet pity, such weary sorrow, that the words felt less like an accusation and more like a lament.

Living, for her, had a strange cruelty to it. The body seemed to endure long after certain parts of the soul had already begun to decay. She wasn’t sick, not truly, but something in her appearance suggested rot all the way.


Her eyes were dark as a void, not a single spark of light within them. Looking into them was uncomfortable, like staring into a depth that refused to reflect anything back. Her lips were always searching for moisture, dry and restless, as if even the smallest comfort had been denied to her.

Her voice was quiet, so quiet it was almost impossible to hear unless you listened carefully. Not that she spoke much anyway. It was as if words cost her something vital, as if every sentence pulled at her heartstrings with such violence that they threatened to snap.

___

She smiles. She talks. She exists among others who move through the same slow marionette play, all of them hanging from the same bared, worn-out threads. It almost seems as if they, too, want very much to die, just not quite as desperately as she does.

So she becomes something of an artifact, a quiet display for their pity, a living reminder of what happens when the threads wear too thin. A vine clinging to a bridge, too stubborn to wilt, yet not resilient enough to stop losing pieces of itself along the way.

The strange thing was, she didn’t really want to die.

It was just that there is a slower kind of dying that no one ever speaks about. Not the sudden kind, not the kind marked by funerals and quiet condolences. This one happens gradually, almost politely, so quietly that you hardly notice it at first.

It begins somewhere inside you... some small, invisible place where warmth used to live. It takes things slowly. First the color from your thoughts, then the meaning from your days. It takes your soul long before your body ever shows the signs.

And so you go on living. You breathe. You walk among other people. You smile when you remember to. From the outside, nothing seems wrong.
But inside, something has already begun to decay.
___

It is a quiet kind of rot, the kind that keeps you standing, keeps you speaking, keeps you existing long after the essential parts of you have already slipped away. Not dead. Just rotten.

Her slipping away was not the dramatic kind with sirens and hospital beds, but the slow erosion of things once thought permanent. Days blurred into a dull procession. Joy dimmed. Something within her softened… thinned… until it was too spectral to grasp with ravaged hands.

It was a dirge-like sight... the fracture of her breath, the tremor in her voice, the tears worn thin from overuse. She carried herself like someone waiting for the earth to claim her, her head bowed as though she had forgotten the sky existed.
___

There is a smell to decay, they say. Damp earth. Sweetness turning sour. But the rot that settles into people makes no such announcement.

The strange thing about decay is its patience. It does not hurry. It settles into the bones, the mind, the long ordinary days we mistake for living. By the time anyone notices, the pulse that once carried life has already thinned into something faint… something almost gone..

___

So when the mournful bells rang that week, it wasn’t surprising. It was almost as if everyone had already been preparing themselves for that sorrowful tune to begin. The sound did not shock anyone. It only confirmed what had been quietly expected for some time.

That was the first, and the last time anyone saw a small, soft smile on that otherworldly, translucent face of hers in a long while. It was faint, almost fragile, as if it might disappear the moment someone looked too closely. And anyone watching might have thought the same thing: She must have wanted very much to die.

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Note: These pages are written as diary entries through a passage of time from childhood to teenage perspective. The story explores unfortunate events, but it is handled with care and respect. If anything in this story feels offensive or disrespectful, I sincerely apologize. My intention is only to honor courage and resilience of people even through the horror’s of this world.

I thought when something breaks, the person who broke it feels bad. That’s how it always worked in my world. If I dropped a cup or snapped a doll’s arm off by accident, I cried harder than anyone else, even when my mother tried her best to shush me. The guilt would eat me up and make me desperate to make it right.


I would try to fix it. I would say sorry over and over, even if it couldn’t be put back together. So when the world broke something in me, I waited for that same kind of sorrow to show up on those unfamiliar faces.


I waited for their hands to reach out like mine used to, desperate to repair what they had ruined, to sew me up again like I used to do when I accidentally broke something of my doll. But they didn’t look like someone who had broken anything at all. I don’t understand how they can hold the pieces of me and not even feel the weight of them.


It was a strange feeling to be left in ruin while I cried out with every ounce of breath in me, and the whole world just stood there, tall on their steady feet, looking down. They didn’t move. They didn’t bend. They only stared with that same expression I used to see when my friends didn’t want me in their games, that quiet, careful distance, like I was something inconvenient.


I remember the sting behind my eyes back then, the way tears would threaten but never fall. I don’t cry, I would tell myself. I’m a big girl after all. That’s what my mother used to say, with a smile bright as the sun.


But she didn’t say the same thing to the other children on the playground, which I never quite understood. They are like me too, aren’t they? We have the same hands, the same scraped knees, the same favorite games. We run the same races and laugh at the same silly things. So why was I the only one told to be brave? Why was I the only one taken care of?


Even now, I don’t understand the difference between me and their children. There are so many adults here, so many tall figures to look up to, to reach for. My hands are open. My voice is loud enough. But they do not answer me. They answer only their own. They cry only for their own.

No one takes my hand to guide me through these ruins. No one bends down to see if I am frightened too. I keep looking for my mama or baba in the crowd, but I can’t seem to find them anywhere. It’s fine though. I have my doll with me. I’ll help her find the way out. And maybe, while I’m helping her, I’ll find mine too.

My stomach is grumbling. A kind lady had offered me some bread yesterday, but I can’t find her anywhere today. She had told me to stay behind this wall and wait for her, but she didn’t come. I guess she must have forgotten her way. I understand though. It’s getting difficult to find your way these days.

The streets are broken, and there are houses everywhere. Well, parts of houses are broken, just like my doll’s house. That makes me sad too. It’s hard to walk through the rubble, hard to find the corners that feel safe, and I still haven’t found my mama yet. She’s gotten really good at hiding, I must say.


We’ve been playing hide-and-seek for at least a week now, and I still haven’t found her. But I’m getting bored of the game, and I’m getting pretty tired too. My legs hurt, and no one is helping me look for her. Baba went to look for her once, but I think he’s started hiding from me too.


There’s been a lot of shouting adults around me lately, and they all seem scared and tired. I don’t think they really sleep, not like I do. It’s really loud outside these days, and then, of course, there are those sudden buildings falling down. I tried asking some people what was happening or if they had seen my parents, but they just start crying and hug me so tight. Or they say they’ve gone for some work and will be back soon and tell me not to cry.


I don’t understand. How can they be so scared and tired and still expect me not to cry? I just want someone to tell me when my mama and baba will come back home. I’m really angry at them. When they do come back, I won’t talk to them at all, not until they get me a new toy, or at least just come back soon.


I’m really scared. I’m trying to act like a big, strong girl, just like my mama, but everything is so frightening. I’m so hungry, and I don’t know where to go or who to ask for help. My legs hurt so much, and I can’t pretend anymore that I don’t see how everyone is as helpless as I am. And then there’s so much blood everywhere, so much crying, and I don’t think my parents are really coming back. I think everyone is lying to me, just like they lie to my friends.

They all keep telling us not to worry, that help is coming soon, that this will all be over soon, that it’s just a test and we will soon get a great prize for it. They keep saying that our people around the world will help us, even with tears in their eyes, blood on their clothes, hunger for peace, trembling in their voices. But the people they keep calling never seem to answer. Some did come. They brought food, a lot of it, but it was sadly not enough to feed everyone. Most of the adults didn’t eat much, or not at all. They said they weren’t that hungry, but I know that’s a lie. I’ve gotten really good at catching it when they are lying.

It’s been a long time since I saw my mama and baba. Longer still since anyone stayed long enough to remember my name. Faces come and go like smoke, too quick to hold, too quiet to follow. They used to say this was just a test. That help would come. That if we waited patiently, we’d be safe again. But I think I stopped believing that when the ground started swallowing the buildings whole.

I found mama and baba eventually. Or maybe they found me. They were still holding hands under the broken stone, like they didn’t want to leave each other behind. Her smile was still there, somehow. I think it’s the only thing that didn’t get buried. I didn’t cry. I think a part of me stayed down there with them. The part that used to laugh with a full stomach. The part that used to chase after the sun.


My people still whisper about hope. They still make promises they can’t keep. They say help is coming, as if saying it will make it true. Maybe it will. Maybe that’s what keeps us standing. That, and the way we all pretend not to notice the red on our hands.


I smile now too. Not because I’m happy, but because it keeps people from asking if I’m okay. It helps them forget I’m still waiting for someone to take my hand. I don’t wait as loudly as I used to. I’ve learned how to be quiet. But I still remember how it felt to break something and want to fix it. I wonder if anyone else remembers that too, if the world watching us through a mere lens remembers that we are one of them.


But I wonder how cowardly, how small, a person must be to close their eyes the moment it’s not their own.


Sometimes, when the streets are quiet and the sky is pink like the bruises I try not to remember, I pretend someone is reaching for me. I pretend that if I stretch my hand far enough, I can feel it clasped by someone who still knows how to care. I hold onto that thought for a long while, even if no one ever really comes. It’s not much, but it keeps me moving forward, keeps my hands from shaking, keeps my eyes open, keeps the pieces of me from scattering completely.


And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough to remind me that I am still here, and that even in all this, I can still remember how to reach out, even when the world has forgotten how to cradle something falling into ruins, every passing second.

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___

My heart doesn’t sit inside my chest the way it should; it rests in your hands, obedient, warm, like it was always meant to be there. You don’t even have to try. It curls around your finger on its own, devoted, ridiculous, completely yours.

You’re like my red crayon, the kind that runs through your veins, keeping you alive, giving life so beautiful that even the sun seems to brighten your eyes.

Its rays fall on my skin, and suddenly I am gold. The moon shines on me as if through a soft, blurred veil, shyly touching us, yet still present. It feels strange, but it is true. You make me myself. No, you let me be me.
___

One random morning, I listened to my favorite track and realized there was competition. It seemed to lose. It was as if I could hear the soundtrack to this warm, fuzzy feeling, and it began the moment your voice spoke. The syllables rolled off your tongue, steadying my heart. The timbre lifted something inside me, lightening my soul.

Last night I saw you in my dream. Strange, yet vivid. You sat there, humming as if to angels, a melody so fine it soothed you from the inside out. Then you turned and smiled, and it was as if the blood running through me had been drugged, suspended in ecstasy. I felt high, yet grounded enough to breathe, to keep the illusion alive.
___

I will bare my heart for a second: I do not even care if I ever touch you. Love was never about that for me. Just the moment I breathe you in, I grow dizzy, as if inhaling something I was never meant to. It is a feeling so peculiar I can never catch its first note. It rises so high, I can never quite reach it.

I wish I could say I still have control, but when you step close, my heart collapses. My nerves tangle so messily it takes forever to unravel them. My eyes ignite, as if witnessing a world artifact. My smile becomes a poem too delicate to be touched. When you look at me, I become a beauty not of this world, too ethereal to exist.
___

This feeling makes me believe my heart might burst from ecstasy. It burns deliciously, almost aches, a pleasure too fine to be forgotten, a melody that finds my lost rhythm again and again.


Let’s be honest, you’re way out of my league. And yet it feels as if I was always meant to be yours. You make it seem predestined, as if I was written in your stars long before I knew, grazed upon you a revelation long before me.

So just know, I will always look for you in the stars if you forget your way. I will always be there, like the oh-so-beautiful moon, waiting through phases, for the sun to find it’s way home.
___

Whenever your hands graze me, I feel like a painting,exquisite, fragile, a single strong stroke enough to ruin me. When you hold me, I am over the moon. Cheesy, yes, but true. I float toward the stars, as they keep glancing at us with grace that makes me lower my gaze.

The way your love flows through your gaze makes me hesitate, as if it is a dream too surreal. The way you take my breath in the most innocent ways makes me search for you, for a sanctuary filled with the same kind of love... but it never seems to exist.
___

I wish I could say I still have control, but my veins are so filled with your red that it feels no longer my own. The strength you give me is a treasure too precious to forget, a peace too reverent to be disturbed.


The secluded sky feels like it has become our home, patiently waiting for us to make the first move so it can carry us as high as love dares. Honestly, I don’t care where the highway of stars leads, as long as it’s just the two of us... deluded together.

I have come to realize that love can make you want to live fully, to wake up with a newfound appreciation for life every unique morning. That each night, sleep can lull you so elegantly it almost seems a trick, and dreams once out of reach can become achievable with the right words. Love can even make you fall in love with yourself. It's strange... your love is too strange to me yet it's exactly what I wanted love to ever be.
___

I wish I could say I still have control, but you, my love, have made me lose myself in a way that feels like finding myself, away from a maze of complications, too hazy to pick up again...

you, my love, have made me disappear into a universe we once shared, only to wake and find that the stars have moved on without you.

So, at the end I hope the constellations you shared with me are still glowing, wherever you may be... though they’ve stopped shining for me.

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Who Is She ?

I never loved you gently. I loved you like the last cigarette, fingers trembling, lungs screaming, knowing it would kill me, and relishing the burn anyway. I loved you like a ghost lodged behind my ribs, like a shadow that twists around my heartbeat. I loved you like poison in slow motion, like fire that devours the house while I stand inside it, smiling. I loved you so fully that even your absence tastes like ash on my tongue, and I am still hungry.


My love for you was a starving ghost, always on the edge of devouring itself. It rattled inside my ribs, thin and trembling, surviving on echoes instead of flesh. I mistook the hollow for hunger, the hunger for devotion.

It felt as though I had been born without the droplets meant to keep a heart alive, parched from the beginning, mistaking mirages for mercy. You were the first illusion that shimmered long enough for me to kneel before it.

It was like living inside a dream where everything was soft at the edges, where your voice sounded distant and holy, where I could never quite touch you without waking up.

But wait, was it ever real?

Was I in love with you, or with the haze that wrapped around you? With the outline my loneliness traced in the dark?

I call your name across an endless maze, and it echoes back to me, but the words are never the same. They return jumbled, distorted, as if you’re answering in a language too intricate for my desperate tongue. Each syllable bends, reshapes itself, becomes something foreign before it reaches my ears.

Wait…

Is it really you speaking back?

Or is it only my own voice ricocheting off damp stone walls?

Is it not exactly what I had said, only twisted by distance and my own trembling hope? Does the endless haze swallow sound too, make it misty, blur the edges until even truth forgets its shape?

The ethereal, haunting beauty of your face makes me want to rip out my own eyes if they dare to blink, as though a single second of darkness would be a betrayal. I want to keep staring, unbreathing, unmoving, as if devotion alone could make you solid.

Your skin, or what I imagine of it, seems so intricately delicate, like something sculpted from fog and moonlight. I am terrified that if I look away, you will rearrange yourself. That I will return to find only absence where you once stood.

But no. That isn’t right.

I don’t really know what you look like, do I?

Have you ever even turned in my direction long enough for me to catch more than a silhouette? A flicker? A trick of light pretending to be a face?

Wait. Was it just a haunting haze all along?

Did I carve features into smoke? Did I assign softness to something that never had skin? No — that can’t be right.

I heard it. I heard you.

You answer me whenever I call out, wherever you may be. Your voice folds itself into the air between us, slips through the cracks in my ribs, settles somewhere behind my lungs. It is too precise to be imagined. Too immediate to be memory.

When I whisper your name into the dark, something stirs.

Something replies.

Even if the words return fractured, even if they twist and rearrange themselves, they come back warm. Alive. Not empty. Don’t they?

Tell me echoes don’t learn the sound of your own longing. Tell me walls don’t eventually memorize the shape of your voice and throw it back at you with tenderness.

___

Because if it is only me… if I am both the caller and the answer, if I am the ache and the relief that follows. Perhaps I was never staring at you at all, but at the desperate outline my longing projected against the dark.And if that is true…

Then what have I been devoting myself to? A blur of time?

A moment stretched thin until it felt eternal? A memory I kept polishing until it mistook itself for a person?

Is she anything more than mist caught in the ribs of yesterday? Or is she a haunting I stitched into my own shadow, something I summoned because silence was too vast, too honest?

My own skin feels like paper stretched over a hollow chest, fragile and thin, as though one sharp breath could tear me open. Inside, the echoes of what should have been laughter, love, or hope have long since dissolved into dust. I carry the outline of emotions without their substance, the shape of joy without its weight.
How can this be?

How can she be nothing more than a dream?

She felt too vivid to be imagined. Too warm. Too immediate. I remember the way her presence seemed to alter the air, the way my pulse shifted as though answering something real. Hallucinations aren’t supposed to have gravity. They aren’t supposed to linger in the bloodstream.

She can’t just be a misty haze. She can’t collapse into something so insubstantial when she once felt like the only solid thing in the obscurity .

___

I ache for her with such profound emptiness that even the void would recoil at the depth of it. It moves through me like wind through a cracked window, sharp, relentless, scattering pieces of myself across the floor of my own chest. Nothing fills the space she left. Nothing lingers long enough to soften it. I keep reaching, and my hands close around air that refuses to become solace.


My love for her is too deeply rooted to wither. It has threaded itself into bone, into marrow. Sometimes I fear it has become immortal, that even time will not erode it. She has to be real.

Somewhere across this sea of shards, across whatever distance fractured us, she must exist, breathing, moving, unaware of the gravity she left inside me.


If I am this tangled, if my pulse still answers to her absence, then surely she must feel something too. A tremor. A tug beneath her ribs. Veneration… cannot exist in such a one-sided way, right?

It cannot be this vast and return nothing but silence.

And yet.

Breath is something no one else can truly give back. Devotion cannot be returned like a borrowed object.

Maybe what I am waiting for is not her footsteps, but my own lungs remembering how to expand without her shadow standing in the doorway of my dreams.

Maybe immortality is not love surviving.

Maybe it is me waking up and the illusion breaking.

Accepting the reality… she is nothing.

Not absence, not presence, just a flicker my own chest dared to believe was real. I have loved a shape carved from longing, a flicker of smoke pressed against the hollow of my own ribs.

Her voice, her eyes, her warmth, they were never mine to call, never mine to haunt me.

I am both the phantom and the haunted, the caller and the echo, trapped in a devotion that answers only to itself.

I have spent lifetimes in a room that never existed, chasing a shadow that dissolves the moment I reach for it.

And still… I call.

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There was a time when I gathered my courage like loose change in trembling hands and finally opened my mouth. I spoke. I let the words fall between us, fragile and unfinished. But not long after, I understood something, we could only ever be friends. Nothing more. And perhaps, alot less.

It was strange. I had never in my life wanted to reach toward someone the way I reached toward him. There was a pull, almost instinctive. A quiet urgency.

But the truth was complicated.

Yes, I liked him. I did.

But I did not want him to like me back.

I did not want to become someone he would choose. I did not want to be held in that way, to take up space in his hands or in his future. I wanted the feeling without the weight of being wanted in return. I wanted to admire from a safe distance, untouched, unclaimed, unresponsible.

Because if he wanted me back, then I would have to exist fully. And that felt far more terrifying than loving him alone ever did.It was easier this way. No explanations. No risk of someone mishandling what I could barely carry myself. I told myself I preferred it ,the safety of distance, the dignity of silence, but safety has a lonely aftertaste. Too bad I have grown to love that taste far more than I would ever admit.

So all I loved, I loved alone.

That had been the only time I ever truly wanted someone. The irony being that he wanted me back. And so, he had to go. I had to put a full stop to this feeling that was growing too quickly, too loudly, threatening to undo the careful distance I had built around myself. It was consuming me in ways I was not prepared to survive.

The truth was, I was not hard enough yet to place a period at the end of us. So instead, I chose a semicolon. A pause. A hesitation. A quiet admission that perhaps this was not over — only suspended.

To leave a space.

For the day I might gather my courage again.

I did not mind loving from afar. There was something almost holy about it, the quiet sacrifice of wanting without reaching. I convinced myself that love did not require return, only endurance. But there was no endurance on my part at all.

It was never some grand act of strength. It was simply another day, just with a sharper tug at my already crumbled mind. A little heavier. A little louder. I wanted him. Just not close enough to become a reality instead of a sweet dream.

So all I loved, I loved alone.

I gathered the smallest moments, a shared laugh, a lingering glance, and held them close like they were something fragile and rare. I would fix my hair a little better on certain days, giggle at things that probably weren’t that funny, pretend my heart wasn’t beating louder than usual.

And three times, when the story could have turned into something more, I let it stay where it was. Not because he didn’t want me. But because maybe he did. I wasn’t afraid of loving him. I was only afraid of being loved back. So I chose distance, soft, careful distance, and watched from afar, like someone rereading their favorite page instead of finishing the book. It wasn’t tragic. It was just me, loving the only way I knew how.

I reached in ways no one could see. I burned without smoke, cried without sound, held out hands that trembled just before touching. Every time I almost had something, I withdrew, not because I did not want it, but because wanting felt too expensive and unfamiliar almost as if I was selling myself out and the buyer was someone I deeply resented... strange I know.

And so, all I loved, I loved alone.

It was not that I was unloved. It was simply that my love never seemed to arrive at the right time, or in the right form, or in the right hands.

So I kept it.

I kept all of it for myself. Learned to hold myself in the softest ways, to build a world that was at once fragile and beautiful ,

a small cage lined with sunlight and shadows, a place where happiness and grief and love could live together, quietly, without expectation.

And so, all I loved, I loved alone;

waiting for the right sentence to come along, the one that would finally let me place a full stop without fear.

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I pray you do not fall in love with me, for I am falser than vows made in wine, sweet on the lips, sworn in the dark, gone by the fragile edge of morning light. I speak in sighs and borrowed truths, dress fleeting desire as something divine. I will hold you close, then drift away, a sin in silk, a love out of time.

You are the most beautiful bouquet of dying flowers I have ever seen, blooming too brightly for a love meant to last. Your colors bled into my hands, your scent whispered stay while time whispered past, and I loved you knowing beauty like yours never survives.

I will touch you as if you were already slipping away, as if holding you any tighter would make you vanish. I will kiss you until your breath breaks, then stop as though restraint were mercy, as though wanting less were possible. My hands will reach for you without permission, muscle memory shaped by longing, yet they will hesitate at the last moment, trembling just short of your skin. I will leave you aching on purpose, suspended in that awful, holy space where love is almost yours, close enough to ruin you, far enough to never save you.

You are always out of my reach no matter how hard I try. It feels as though there is a magnetic field between us and we both belong on the same edge of it. Whatever we do we can never clash. Some invisible force will always stand between us, ensuring we can never truly meet, forever rooted in our places, two different yet mirroring worlds.

You will always notice when I am gone. I will teach your body to miss me before it ever learns how to hold me. I will become the remedy for your pain, let you take whatever you want, do whatever makes you happy, as long as it is not me.

You are the mistake I am forever willing to pay for, a sin I am always willing to commit. You are the song that refuses to let my mind rest, the tear that never falls, the heaviness in my chest and the lump in my throat I never want to disappear. Pain is a concept long gone. You are the only key to the locks of my mind, the only solution to the unending riddle of my life. You are the most beautiful river that begs to be polluted.

I pray you do not fall in love with me, for I am sweeter than nectar yet poisonous as oak. I will root myself into your veins so permanently you will ask for my permission to let the crimson flow inside your doomed heart. I will not stay long. The moment you want to engulf me, the moment you lay your head against me, I will disappear like a ghost. The wind will run through your hair, you will smile without knowing why, and in that instant I will no longer be a presence you had grown used to, but something that feels like nostalgia for a moment that never truly existed.

You are my doomed serenity. You are my punishment for a sin I am not sure I committed. You are the cruelest part of my damned life, always slipping away, always a little less than before. You refuse to take my half even while knowing I am already fully yours. Your name flows through my veins like a drug, keeping me high, never letting me catch my breath, always keeping me on the edge. Never letting me sober enough to make sense, never letting me lost enough to live in delusion.

I will sit with you through endless nights but never stay until morning. I will listen to every story you tell without pause but keep mine locked away. I will hold you until your eyes are emptied of tears, yet I will never let you dry mine. I will stop your hand before it wipes away the remains of my soul spilling through my eyes. I will let you watch me unfold but will never allow you to pause the fall.

You taught me the shape of your absence. You left me with an anxiety that gnaws at my insides, with wet eyes and an aching soul. You became the remedy for a pain you caused, and I let you, because wanting you was the only thing that ever felt real.

I will set myself on fire so you can see in the dark, but I will never let you pull me from it. I will let myself drown so you have enough air to breathe, but I will not let you drag me back to shore. I will build you a home you can return to, a place made of love, care, and the hopes you were never brave enough to hold, but I will not be there. That home will forever be yours and yours alone. I will be an old photograph hanging somewhere, the kind that makes you stop for only a moment before you look away, never important enough to keep, never gone enough to forget.

You are unfinished beauty. You are a picture that refuses to be completed, the painter always running out of paint just before the last stroke. You are a river that refuses to drink, always dry at the end. You are the sweetest treat that leaves bitterness on my tongue, and still I crave you.

I pray you do not fall in love with me, for I am always running out of time, always too late to be found, always too early to find solace. Always a step away from relief, always a step ahead of your ache. I will keep slipping from your hands because I am too far gone to ever become a place you could call home. I must drift away, let myself become the ash I crave, listen for the bells ringing, the final answer I have been searching for…

You were the touch I was desperate for, the thought that slips away if not caught in time. You were the most insane verse of a melody I ever tried to learn, the most ethereal tune that is not considered music. You were the pulse monitor begging to be turned off, the rhythm that never wanted to be found, the sickness I kept pretending I could cure.

I will leave without violence, without noise, without giving you something clear enough to hate me for. I will make my absence gentle, almost kind, so you forgive me before you understand what I took with me. You will search for me in rooms that feel unfamiliar, in silences that stretch too long, and you will call it longing instead of loss. I will be gone by then, already turning into something you remember fondly, something that hurts less if you pretend it never meant that much, and I will let you do that, because disappearing has always been the only way I know how to love.

I finally touched you. I held you close and kissed your frame, but you crumbled in my hands before I could even think of digging your grave. You promised me a home once. Did you ever realize you were the fading hope I had finally been brave enough to hold.

I tried to replace the name running through my veins, but my veins screamed in protest, chanting the same verse again and again. You were the prettiest bouquet of dying flowers I ever tried to hold, and I bled for you, in vain.

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But I have work to do today. Work that requires a steady hand and an unflinching heart. Today I must be cruel. I must crack open my own chest and salt the inside so nothing tender dares grow again. I have to gut remembrance, turn my warm, begging soul into stone, and set it somewhere nothing can touch it so it never learns familiar warmth from different hands.

Today I have to petrify my living soul mid pulse, destroy it before it starts to fuel the broken bridges of my mind it has begun to reassemble. I must dismantle the shattered pieces of my specter it once swore never to cast out. I have to burn the threads running through my body before they start to pump forsaken crimson again. I must reach the shore today, sail the ship, and cast away the ashes of my incinerated nerves so they never reach another core to torment.

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I woke this morning with a strange devotion to slaughter bound to my being. A craving for ruin. A sickening will to carve myself inside out. I want to drown the past in gasoline that refuses to stay solid long enough to bury, to strike the match with my own hands and watch it burn in the mirror. To witness my being scream until it no longer recognizes itself, then stitch the ashes into a body too unfamiliar to ache.

I must drown myself today, fill the bath with venom instead of something familiar. I have to hold my breath and count to a million before I allow myself to surface again. Catalogue the vivid imagery tearing through my vision. Leave my orbs bare until insight is rinsed out irrevocably. I need to unthread the buttons from my doll’s eyes to correct what was sewn into mine.

Today I must book myself a grave, dug by my bare hands clawing until no trace of skin remains, only raw, glistening red. I have to feel the pain so these unclaimed hands never dare to reach out again. Make it eighteen feet deep so by the time I reach the bottom I am nothing but grotesque meat, too mangled to scream for rescue, too ruined to ever be retrieved.

Before that I must move through the day half translucent, a ghost threading warped edges. Every sound stretches. Every touch arrives too late. I hear people articulate and feel their words peel away, useless and unbinding, slipping through me like a haze. I relearn the choreography of the living. When to nod. When to swallow. When to pretend the burning has ceased. How to perform existence as if I were released, a marionette undone yet never deceased.

I drift through hours collecting fragments of speech that crumble between my fingers. Movements rehearsed. Expressions opaque. Every step a rehearsal. Every glance a quiet surrender for the play I am curating. I am present and yet absent, stitched to the living with invisible veins. Only darkness promises release, but I must wait for the sun to withdraw before I can begin sewing myself again.

There is a moment when the body forgets its vows. When breath settles. When the pulse steadies. When something like peace grazes the surface. I crush it immediately. Mercy is a weed. If left unattended, it roots. I cannot afford softness while memory still knows my name.

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Tonight I must drag myself to the dug grave and leap in so my bones can fray. I need to be completely in pieces when I let myself drift away so that by morning I am incapable of holding the threads of memory still trapped in frame. I must open my replaced eyes to the dew and not crave the strain I carried the day before. I have to wake again in a stitched up body, too deformed to be desired by unwilling hands again.

I have to wake with no memory sharp enough to remember why it once mattered, stitched and standing, emptied of the familiar ache.

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I’ll learn to swallow my voice in your womb, so you won’t have to strain yours. Cut my cords in your cradle, so the blame never reaches your hands. Bite off my tongue. Let silence learn my name. I will listen, as you teach me how.

This time around i will not dare dream, will pull out the threads that let them grow wont stop even if crimson blurs my orbs. I'll be the perfect daugter with dreams you hold sewn as my own, folded into my chest, tightened until they fit.

Mother, eat me and give birth to me again. This time around, I'll come out quieter, less breakable, with my hands already knowing how to hold the weight of your disappointment without trembling.

I will learn the weight of wanting nothing, learn how to look grateful for the sight of approval, how to nod when you tell me this is love, this is care, and how to hold that expression long enough for you to believe it.

This time around i will sacrifice as you want, wont open my mouth for a wish i hold, i wont ask for love from you if it grows heavy, if it tires you, if i disappoint you in this life too. I wont make the same mistakes, will make sure i smile at your hands, stand as you say, eat as i am allowed, and learn to disappear before you notice i am still wanting.

Mother, eat me and give birth to me again. This time around i’ll make you proud… i’ll rot my ears learning your commands, the way you want your tea, the way sweetness sickens you, the way you ache for your mother, the memories that hollow you out at night.

I’ll carry them inside me like prayers left rotting, swallow them whole, so your grief never has to remember me, I’ll wear your grudges as my own, learn who deserves my silence, teach your griefs to breathe in me, and forget the ones that I held alive.

This time around i’ll strip myself of ego, stay at your feet to keep you standing tall, forget what selfishness once whispered, never let you bleed another drifting wound, save the ones you held close, make you whole, even if it costs me my soul.

Mother, eat me and give birth to me again. This time around I’ll make you proud, or I’ll finally learn, slowly, that pride was never meant to be the price of being loved, that love does not demand sacrifice, and that I can give myself away without losing what is mine.

Maybe i will learn that i was never meant to lose myself whole in devotion i hold, leave myself hollow just for you to keep me close, forget the sound of my own voice so you can fill the void you never learned to cradle, swallow me quiet so your hands never tremble.


Or maybe this time, I’ll rise instead. Not to make you proud, not to fit into the hollowed shape you carved for me, but to feel my own weight, to let my voice live beyond your hands. I will carry my own grief, my own quiet joys, my own unspoken prayers. I will unlearn the habit of disappearing, and in the space I carve for myself, I might finally learn what it is to be held, not to be small, not to be perfect, but simply alive.

Mother, eat me and give birth to me again, this time around maybe i won’t let myself find a life outside your womb, suffocate myself inside your cradle so i will never have to write this again, so i can rest where i began, held without asking, so this ache is buried before it learns my name.

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I find you everywhere. This morning, I tasted you in my coffee, lingering on my tongue like a habit I never learned to break. Last night, I listened to your favorite song before I could find rest, letting it fill the quiet sorrow you left behind. You are woven into every inch of the scenery my eyes rest upon, in passing streets, familiar rooms, honeyed scents, and glimpses that were never meant to carry your name yet somehow do.


I search for you without meaning to, in gestures, in memories, in the way my heart still races at the slightest resemblance to your name, as if you might appear at any second. I can comprehend a life that has no you in it, but nothing in it would be worth living, because even in your absence, you exist everywhere I look. Forgetting you feels less like a choice I could make and more like an impossible language I was never taught to speak and will never find the scripts to learn.

Whenever I come across a word too beautiful to read, I think of you, only to realize it falls short. How could a mere word, created by beings so ordinary, ever compare to you, when even the moon rises early just to steal a longer glimpse of the serenity you hold? How could the words of this world ever describe you, when you are not of this doomed land, too perfect for its chaos, too good for its sinners, too pure for its darkened souls, too beautiful for these eyes to bear?

I would search even the most ancient languages if only to find a word that comes close to telling you what you mean to me. I may fail, but I would fade with the satisfaction that my search was for you. I never thought I would wait for someone like you, yet you have changed my life and my soul so deeply that even the ugliest of sights feel beautiful now.


You have woven clarity and serenity into my veins, and I no longer remember how to look into the mirrors of others without smiling, in appreciation of beauty hidden from the eyes of the beholder yet too translucent to remain unseen if one truly tries.


How could I ever forget you, when you gifted me a new set of eyes and a new mind, one that can no longer speak with hatred, think with malice, touch with the intent to hurt, or exist without softness? And all of this happened so unintentionally, as if I had never been a person without pity for humanity.

How could I ever thank you with mere words, when they will never be enough to describe what you did for me, how you turned my world upside down in the best way, and then disappeared without giving me the chance to offer you the peace you truly deserve, to build you a separate land where no one could ever take away the love you hold for the world?

How could I ever know how to thank you, when you never needed it, when you gave me this permanent smile without even trying, simply by being yourself? The darkness slipped away to make room for you, and in its place you filled me with an unconditional will to live.

___

And now, I am learning to let you rest where you belong, not behind me, not ahead of me, but gently within me. I will no longer wait at the doors of yesterday, hoping for footsteps that are not meant to return. I will carry what you gave me with care, the widened vision, the softened hands, the quiet courage to keep choosing life, and I will let that be enough.

I will not forget you. I will simply stop searching for you in every corner of the world. I will allow mornings to be just mornings, songs to be only songs, and silence to exist without aching for your name. You will remain in the way I love, in the patience I offer, in the kindness I extend without thinking. That is where you will live now.


This is my love loosening its grip without losing its truth. I release you with a tenderness that does not ask for return, and I walk forward carrying the best of what we were, not as a wound, but as proof that something beautiful once existed and changed me forever.


So this is my goodbye, not spoken with sorrow, but with peace. I move on, not because you meant little, but because you meant enough.

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I try to look away, to escape, but the sound finds me anyway, nesting in the dark corners of my mind, whispering that I am nothing more than a witness to its relentless, inescapable rhythm.

The constant ticking wreathes my ears, assuring me I have touched numbness before it drags me far beyond. Every passing second presses like a pulse against the uncanny life I know. Every thudding beat is a prose too lyrical to rhyme, and I am the thing being spent.

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The clock thrums to the rhythm of my heart, never quiet, never matching, always a beat faster. I chase it yet cannot catch up, no matter how fast I run. Time moves on cue to my desperation, slipping through my fingers, fading like camera film. The image blurs again and again. I find no cure for this sick wanting to tick away.

Tick‑tock… tick‑tock…

Tic… This is all that runs through my veins now. Blood feels foreign. Crimson is distant, something once real, now only mourned. Time does not pass. It stalks. I wonder if it would have been easier to catch it before desperation hollowed me out, before I forgot how to chase anything that did not already flee, before the clock crept toward the hour when illusion peels itself away.

The film had not yet faded, but I refused to look. I turned from the evidence of warmth, from the memory of an embrace that was once mine to keep. Now the image rots in my absence because I was never brave enough to reach out before it disappeared.

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The clock will one day stop. Time will end its yearning journey. I may hollow myself out long before then, trying to draw close to a ghostly force I cannot touch. Mayhap I like the chase, no, I do not like it. I endure it. I try because I cannot let go of the fading picture. I cannot let it become a blank canvas. It must remain visible, no matter how worn, no matter how faint. As long as it exists, I will keep chasing, even if the ticking of time deafens my existence.

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It moves like a shadow through the corners of your vision, and you cannot look away. It burns, it beckons, it knows the places you hide from even yourself. The things you reach for most are the very things that could undo you, the flames that press against your skin, carve your name into your heart, and leave you trembling in the dark. You follow it anyway, drawn to its edges, knowing they will cut you, knowing it will leave marks no one else can see.

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To call it beautiful is to whisper your surrender. It is to offer yourself, open-handed, foretelling the rest of your undoing as certainly as the night. The more ethereal a thing is, the more fiercely you desire it. Destined or denied, you will still strive for a graze, a glimpse, even if it scorches you.

The fever worsens. What you want slips further beyond your grasp, dragging you toward a doom that devours you and leaves you starving still. The hunger grows insatiable, so loud it drowns out restraint, so bright it blinds reason. Sanity becomes collateral, willingly abandoned at the altar of wanting.

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Beauty lingers in the abyssal hollows of the mind, leaving scars so deep they never fade. Even when the mind fractures, it remains, the final note, unwavering, unforgiving. A poisoned-sweet echo you hum long after the silence has swallowed your voice. Honeyed enough to crave, lethal enough to ruin you. You know the poison is certain, the departure inevitable and cruel, and still you ache for it.

And in the quiet that follows, when all fire has burned to smoke, you realize it was never the beauty you sought, but the feeling of being utterly consumed. You are left hollow and trembling, yet alive in the shadow it has left behind. It is the part of you that will never rest, the ache that will never fade, the hunger that will always return.

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Even as years pass, even as the world softens around you, that hunger waits. It is patient, eternal, stalking the edges of your memory, ready to flare at the slightest spark. No comfort, no distraction, no love can fully reach it. It is yours alone, a secret fire that defines you, a shadow you chase and cannot outrun, a terror you will call beautiful for all your days.

…

Torment my soul and chew on my bones. Let me dissolve into your core. Haunt me like a ghoul, consume me into oblivion, a void that devours all. If I am the mistake, be the vengeance. Bind me tightly and bare the blade. Stand in front of my eyes as you seal my fate.


Do not disappear before I have slipped away. Make sure to haunt me even after I am in death’s embrace. Replace that embrace with your own and hold me so tight that I struggle to breathe even when I am gone. Make sure I feel the ache, leave my bones singing with strain. Engrave the melody into the abyss of my mind, a tinnitus that never fades.

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If I killed you, deny me solace. Haunt me in a way that leaves even the wraiths holding me with grace. Make it so even death itself acknowledges my ruin. See me as I am. Offer no grace. Toy with me. Use me as your stage. Play the show at the hour of your desire. Tug my skin, strum my heart, string me along, weave me into your game.


Haunt me then, for I too am no saint. If you desire, I will even tear through my own veins. Leave the blade unsoftened when the crimson drains. Let it be certain that my love bears witness to this devotion that knows no end. I will even ensure it is not my decay, just so you can haunt me again.

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Leave me to the void that is my abode, but take heed and haunt that place too. Leave me no space to sip the air. Stay near enough to ache, but never enough to embrace. Imprint yourself on my soul. Etch into my bones the depth so I feel it before comprehension takes hold. Engrave me with a language only the damned know.


You said I killed you? Then make sure you swing the blade when you have satisfied your soul. Finish my sentence. Free my soul. But ensure there is no soul left behind to ache at my loss. Bury me deep, never to be seen, forgotten as though I had never been found. Haunt me in my grave if still not satisfied, for I am hopeless for even a single glance of your eyes.