And yet another day, my sister’s face bloomed with colors no woman should ever have to wear. Purple beneath her eye. Blue stretching across her cheek. A split lip she insisted came from walking into the kitchen cabinet. I wanted to believe her. God knows I wanted to. But cabinets do not leave fingerprints.

Two weeks. That was all it took. Two weeks after standing before God and everyone who loved her, promising forever to the man she believed was her answered prayer, my sister had already forgotten what peace felt like.

I’ll call her Abbie.

A month before the wedding, she came bursting through my apartment door with a tiny velvet box clutched in one hand and tears streaming down her face. “He proposed,” she said before I could even ask why she was crying. She laughed the kind of laugh that only belongs to women who still believe love always arrives dressed in certainty. She couldn’t stop looking at the ring, turning her hand this way and that so the diamond could catch every beam of sunlight pouring through the window. She kept asking, “Isn’t it beautiful?” as though she needed someone else to confirm what her heart had already decided.

I smiled. I hugged her. I cried with her because that’s what older sisters do. We celebrate first and worry later.

But while she admired the diamond, something inside me kept staring at the man who had placed it there.

It’s difficult to explain intuition to people who have never experienced it. There was nothing obviously wrong with Mark. He was polite. He smiled at the appropriate moments. He spoke respectfully to our parents. He quoted Scripture effortlessly, opened doors, remembered birthdays, and somehow always knew exactly what to say. To everyone else, he looked like the kind of man mothers pray their daughters will marry.

But sometimes evil doesn’t arrive wearing horns. Sometimes it wears a tailored suit. Sometimes it carries a Bible. Sometimes it learns the language of kindness so well that no one notices it has memorized the script instead of living it.

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The first time I met him, something in my spirit became strangely quiet. Not peaceful, quiet. The kind of silence that settles over the earth just before a storm tears through it. My eyes couldn’t discern what was wrong, but my soul had already begun to grieve something my mind hadn’t yet discovered.

That evening I called Abbie.

“I don’t know how to explain this,” I told her carefully, “but something about him doesn’t sit right with me.”

There was silence on the other end before she sighed. Then she laughed softly.

“Maybe that’s why none of your relationships have worked.”

I don’t think she knew those words would stay with me for years. Funny how the people we love always know exactly where our wounds are, even when they don’t realize they’re pressing against them.

The words hurt, but not because I believed them. They hurt because they came from my little sister, the same little girl whose scraped knees I had kissed, whose nightmares I had prayed away, whose tears had always felt like my responsibility. Yet somehow, even then, I found excuses for her. I’ve always had that terrible habit. You could hand me a knife still dripping with my own blood, and somehow I would convince myself you hadn’t meant to cut me. I have spent most of my life translating other people’s cruelty into something easier to forgive.

She told me she loved him. She reminded me that every relationship looks different. She asked me to stop overthinking and simply be happy for her. More than anything, she asked me to be her sister, to stand beside her instead of questioning the future she had already chosen.

So I swallowed every warning my heart was screaming.

I helped her pick flowers. I zipped up her wedding dress. I adjusted her veil before she walked down the aisle. I held her bouquet when her hands trembled. I clapped louder than anyone when they kissed. Every photograph from that day captured a smiling sister standing proudly beside a beautiful bride.

Sometimes I look back at those pictures and wonder if guilt has a face. If it does, I think it’s smiling in every single one of them.

The wedding was breathtaking. The flowers were expensive, the music was beautiful, and everyone kept talking about how perfect they looked together. Friends filled social media with captions about soulmates and forever love. Strangers who had watched snippets of the ceremony online commented things like, “This is what true love looks like.”

But photographs have never been good at capturing intuition.

No camera could have photographed the heaviness sitting in my chest while everyone else celebrated. No lens could have captured the quiet fear I carried home with me that evening. Sometimes the most important things remain invisible until it’s too late.

The honeymoon ended, but something else ended too.

Whenever the family wanted to visit, Abbie suddenly had plans. She was working. She was exhausted. She wasn’t feeling well. They had company. She promised we’d all get together next weekend, then the weekend after that, then maybe sometime next month.

Every excuse sounded reasonable until I realized they never stopped.

The sister who used to call me three times a day suddenly struggled to stay on the phone for more than five minutes. Our conversations became rehearsed. Her laughter arrived a second too late. She answered every question with just enough detail to prevent another one.

At first, I convinced myself this was simply marriage. People get busy. They build new routines. Life changes.

But love doesn’t isolate people.

Fear does.

One afternoon I decided to stop asking for permission to visit. I made her favorite casserole, drove across town, and stood on her doorstep rehearsing a speech about how much we all missed her.

When she opened the door, I forgot every word.

She kept the lights behind her turned off. She stood halfway hidden behind the frame, as though darkness itself had become another layer of clothing. Her makeup was thicker than usual, carefully blended across one side of her face.

Too carefully.

Foundation can disguise discoloration, but it cannot erase swelling.

Concealer can soften bruises, but it cannot hide fear.

She turned her head just enough for me to see what she had been trying so desperately to conceal.

A bruise.

Not dramatic enough to make headlines. Not severe enough for strangers to stop and stare. Just enough to tell the truth she had spent weeks burying beneath excuses.

Almost instinctively, she brushed her hair across that side of her face, covering the injury with the same gentle movement she used to tuck loose strands behind her ear.

It struck me then how naturally women learn to make pain look presentable.

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I didn’t ask her what happened.

I already knew.

Women usually do.

The real question was never who had done it.

The real heartbreak was watching my little sister prepare to defend the man who had done it before I had even spoken his name.

Because that is what abuse steals first.

Not safety.

Not freedom.

Truth.

It convinces the victim that the person breaking them is also the only one capable of putting them back together. It teaches them to confuse survival with love and silence with loyalty, until the very hands that leave bruises become the hands they reach for when they are hurting.

And perhaps that is the cruelest prison of all, not the locked doors or the raised fists, but the moment someone begins believing they deserve both.

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Today, I come to bare my soul to the soul-snatcher. I stand here in full capacity, bringing all of me, everything I am, and everything that has been methodically undone. There is no lie left to shield me: I am deeply, entirely a mess. I am a casualty of my own relentless optimism, a woman who watched herself get stabbed by the exact same knife, held by the exact same hands, twice.

How do I look in the mirror now? How do I force my eyes to witness this quiet humiliation of womanhood? I wonder where my pride fled to, how it left me so utterly blind to my own architecture, unable to see that I am inherently worthy of the beauty this life holds. How many times must I lose to the cruel, calculated mathematics of life? How low must I sink to find myself perpetually at the wits’ end of love, crushed by the hollow belief that I am simply incapable of holding even the smallest, simplest affection I was ever offered?

The mirror doesn’t blink. It merely reflects the exhaustion etched into the lines around my eyes, a silent testament to the wars I have fought in secret. The glass is cold, but the shame burning beneath my skin is white-hot.

For so long, I convinced myself that endurance was a virtue. I wore my tolerance for pain like an inheritance, believing that if I just loved harder, if I was just softer, more understanding, more forgiving, the blade would eventually soften too. But a blade is an unyielding thing. And the second time it tore through the fresh scar tissue, the illusion didn’t just crack; it shattered into dust.

I think about the concept of womanhood I carried as a girl. I thought it meant building sanctuaries out of ruins. I thought it meant keeping a lap wide enough to cradle everyone else’s demons while your own starved in the dark. No one warns you about the absolute degradation of giving your entirety to someone who treats your devotion like currency to be spent and discarded. No one tells you how lonely it is to realize you have become an accomplice in your own heartbreak.

I place my palms flat against the cold bathroom counter, letting the chill anchor me. The question that cuts the deepest isn’t why did they do it? The question that keeps me awake, staring at the ceiling until the sky turns a bruised, morning gray, is why did I stay to watch them do it again? Where did I learn to accept the crumbs of intimacy and call it a feast?

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The truth is, I am a prisoner to the delusion of a perfect finish. I have spent a lifetime rewriting tragedies in my head, convinced that if I endure one more chapter of agony, the script will finally flip. I keep waiting for the redemptive arc, that cinematic moment where the pain suddenly makes sense, and the wounds miraculously heal into a beautiful lesson. I wanted the happy ending so desperately that I became willing to burn my own house down to keep the ghost of a dream warm.

That is my truest, deepest incapacity: I do not know how to hold myself back.

When the warning signs flare red, when every instinct screams at me to run, I find myself entirely paralyzed by my own longing. I am incapable of the sharp, clean break. Instead, I choose the soft, slow suicide of staying. I watch my own hands reach out to pull the blade closer, choosing the familiar sting of their betrayal over the cold, terrifying vastness of being alone. I would rather drown in a predictable storm than learn how to swim in open waters.

How pathetic it is to look at the wreckage and realize I built it with my own hands, driven by the desperate fantasy that this time would be different. I wanted to be the exception. I wanted my love to be the alchemy that turned their cruelty into kindness. But love is not a magic trick, and no amount of devotion can force someone to cherish a soul they are committed to tearing apart.

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Every time I try to rise, the gravity of my own desperation pulls me right back to the floor. I am anchored to the tiles by the heavy, humiliating truth that I am still waiting for them to save me from the very fire they lit. I am addicted to the potential of what could be, entirely blind to the rotting reality of what is.

The soul-snatcher doesn’t come with a shadow or a terrifying roar. It comes in the quiet moments when you decide your peace is worth less than someone else’s comfort. It comes when you look at a beautiful life, a life filled with light, laughter, and genuine warmth, and decide, somewhere deep in your subconscious, that it belongs to someone else. Not you. Never you.

So I sit here in the quiet fallout of my own making. There is no grand resurrection today. There is no triumphant emergence from the ashes. There is only the devastating realization that the happily ever after I was chasing was nothing more than a beautiful lie I told myself to justify my own destruction. I am still down here, trapped in the orbit of a ghost, entirely unable to pull myself away.

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She got the built man, but I was the draft.

The invitation had sat on my kitchen counter for three weeks, a heavy square of cream cardstock with elegant gold foil that felt like a tiny, polite execution order.

Leo and Cassandra request the honor of your presence…

Now, sitting in the third row of the chapel, the reality of it was settling heavily in my chest. The scent of expensive white roses and burning wax filled the air, thick and suffocating. Around me, people were whispering, smiling, adjusting their ties and smoothing down their dresses. I just kept my hands tightly clasped in my lap, trying to keep my fingers from trembling.

When the music shifted, the heavy wooden doors at the back of the chapel swung open.

Leo stood at the altar, turning his head to watch his bride walk down the aisle. He looked incredible, tuxedo sharp, hair perfectly styled, a nervous but radiant smile lighting up his face. It was the exact same smile he used to give me when we were nineteen, sitting on the hood of his beat-up car, watching the sun come down over the valley.

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Everyone talks about first loves like they’re a rite of passage, a beautiful, temporary fever you’re supposed to break from so you can grow up. But they never tell you what happens when the fever never leaves. Leo was my first. My first real kiss, my first late-night drive into the unknown, my first glimpse of what forever could look like. He was my only. In the three years since we parted, no one else had ever fit into the spaces he left behind. I had tried, desperately, to let someone else in, but every other touch felt like a foreign language I didn't care to learn. My heart had closed its doors the day he walked away, keeping him as its sole inhabitant.

As Cassandra floated past my row in a cloud of lace, my mind slipped backward, entirely against my will.

I wasn't seeing the grand chapel anymore. I was seeing a cramped, drafty college apartment. I was seeing the night we split a box of cheap mac and cheese because we were both completely broke, laughing until our stomachs hurt.

"When we get married," Leo had said that night, pointing a plastic fork at me, "we're not doing any of that fancy, stiff stuff. We’re having a backyard barbecue. I’m going to bake the cake myself, even if it sinks in the middle."

"Promises?" I had laughed, leaning across the sticky table.

"Promises," he murmured, his eyes turning serious, reaching out to tuck a stray piece of hair behind my ear. "Always you. No matter how long it takes us to get there."

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We had so many of them. We kept those promises for four years. I remembered the summer night before he left for the coast. We were lying on a blanket in my backyard, the grass damp beneath us, staring up at a sky thick with stars. He had turned to me, his fingers tracing the line of my jaw with a reverence that made it hard to breathe.

"I'm going to build a life for us out there," he had vowed, his voice thick with certainty. "It’s just a little bit of time, Maya. I’m going to get established, and then I’m coming back to bring you home. I promise you a future. Just hold on for me."

I held on. I held on until the phone calls grew shorter, until the visits were postponed, and until the promises began to sound like obligations. And then, the world got in the way. Careers pulled us to opposite coasts, the distance stretched our patience until it frayed, and the quiet, devastating realization crept in that sometimes love isn’t enough to hold two shifting lives together. We didn't scream or fight when we broke up; we just cried in an airport terminal and promised to always be in each other's corners.

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A sharp collective intake of breath from the congregation snapped me back to the present. Leo was holding Cassandra’s hands. The priest was speaking, his voice booming softly about sanctity, endurance, and a love that outlasts all things.

"I, Leo, take you, Cassandra..."

I watched his lips move, hearing the ancient vows, but my mind kept overlaying them with his old voice. Always you. He had built that future. He had kept every single promise he made on that blanket, the beautiful house, the steady life, the unshakable commitment. He just hadn't kept them with me.

Cassandra stood there, glowing in her expensive lace, completely unaware of the invisible architecture supporting the man holding her hands. She was getting the finished product. She didn’t know about the version of Leo who used to shut down when he was overwhelmed, or how it took two years of quiet, patient late-night talks in my car to teach him how to articulate his fears instead of running from them. She didn't have to teach him how to listen, or how to apologize, or how to love a woman through her worst days. I had done that. I had taken his rough, boyish edges and spent four years smoothing them down with my own heart. Cassandra was incredibly lucky, she was inheriting a built man, a masterpiece sculpted out of the patience, tears, and unconditional devotion of the girl he left behind. She got the house with the wraparound porch, built on a foundation of promises originally made to me.

The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow, knocking the wind from my lungs. It wasn't that the timing was wrong. It wasn't that the distance was an insurmountable wall. The truth was much simpler, and infinitely more cruel: I just wasn't good enough to keep. I wasn't the woman who inspired him to bridge the gap. I was the rough draft, the stepping stone he walked across to figure out how to love the woman he actually wanted to marry. All those years of pouring my soul into him, of believing his words like scripture, and in the end, my love hadn't been enough to make him stay. I had given him my absolute best, and it had still fallen short of what he needed for a forever.

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I watched him lean down to whisper something in his new bride's ear, making her burst into a bright, breathless laugh. A heavy, suffocating wave of inadequacy washed over me. You can heal from a broken heart, but how do you heal from the knowledge that your absolute best wasn't enough for the only person you ever wanted?

"You may now kiss the bride."

The chapel erupted into applause. Cheers echoed off the high rafters as Leo dipped Cassandra, a picture-perfect moment of pure, unadulterated joy.

I stood up with the rest of the guests, clapping until my palms stung, forcing a bright, celebratory smile onto my face. I looked at her bright, unblemished smile, and surprisingly, the bitterness in my throat softened into something else. I didn’t hate her. How could I? She had simply loved the man I taught how to love.

From the bottom of my heart, I truly wished her the best. I hoped Leo loved her so fiercely, so completely, that she would never have to sit in a quiet room and wonder which part of her wasn't sufficient. I hoped she would never know the crushing, hollow weight of giving someone your entire soul, only to find out you fell short of the prize. Let her keep the magic alive. Let her believe that Leo had always been this perfect, this attentive, this ready for a forever.

I turned my back on the happy couple, the noise of the celebration fading into a dull roar in my ears. I quietly slipped out the side doors before the crowd reached the lobby, letting the cool afternoon air hit my face. I was leaving behind the boy I grew up with, leaving the ghost of his promises behind in the pews. He was moving into the future he had designed, and I was still trapped in the past, a spectator to the life I was never quite good enough to live.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes from watching love rot in real time.

Not all at once.
Not loudly.
Not in the dramatic ways people warn you about.

Sometimes it arrives quietly,
sitting across from you at dinner,
asking if you are really going to wear that dress out.

The first time he frightened me, he did not hit me.

I think that is why I stayed.

People speak about abuse as though it always enters through broken doors and bruised skin, but nobody tells you how it first introduces itself politely. Softly. Almost lovingly.

It begins with the rearranging of your freedom.

Text me when you get there.
Who is that calling you?
I don’t like the way he looks at you.
You know I only act like this because I care.

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And because you are in love, you mistake possession for protection.

I did.

God, I did.

I loved him in the most dangerous way a woman can love a man:
with understanding.

I understood his anger.
Understood his childhood.
Understood the fractures in him.
Understood why his voice sharpened when he was afraid.
Why silence made him cruel.
Why tenderness embarrassed him.
Why he clenched his jaw like every apology was choking him alive.

I understood him so deeply that I started betraying myself to make room for his darkness.

That is the ugly truth nobody writes about.

Love can make you compassionate enough to abandon yourself.

The night it happened, the air between us felt wrong from the beginning.
Heavy.
Like the room already knew something my heart was still trying to deny.

I cannot even remember what started the argument now.
Isn’t that terrifying?

How something so small can become the doorway your life walks through forever.

One minute I was speaking,
the next his hand slammed against the wall beside my head so hard the picture frame shattered onto the floor.

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Because in the seconds after rage leaves them,
They look like boys again.

Broken.
Regretful.
Human.

He cried before I did.

Kept saying,
“Baby, look at me. I would never hurt you.”
As though almost was supposed to comfort me.

I should have left then.

Maybe the older version of me wishes I did.
Maybe she mourns the girl who stayed sitting on that kitchen floor picking glass from the carpet while the man who terrified her held her like he was the one in pain.

But love is rarely logical at its most devastating.

And nobody prepares you for the humiliation of realizing your heart can continue loving someone your body has already started fearing.

That was the beginning of it.

Not the violence.
The shrinking.

I became quieter after that.

Started measuring my tone.
Monitoring my words.
Learning his moods like survival depended on it.

Because it did.

I knew exactly which version of him was walking through the door by the sound of his footsteps alone.

And still,
when he touched me gently,
I convinced myself that gentleness was the truth and the cruelty was merely an interruption.

That is what love does when mixed with fear:
It teaches you to romanticize relief.

The worst part is this:

He was not a monster all the time.

If he were,
leaving would have been easy.

He laughed beautifully.
Held my face like it was sacred.
Memorized small things about me.
Kissed my forehead when I could not sleep.
Spoke about our future like he truly intended to survive inside it with me.

And maybe that is why this confession tastes so bitter in my mouth.

Because I was not only grieving the pain.
I was grieving the man he sometimes almost became.

People will ask why women stay, as though love itself has never made fools out of human beings before.

But I stayed because I kept falling in love with the version of him that appeared after the damage was done.

The remorse.
The softness.
The trembling apologies.
The promises.

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Especially the promises.

You start living off them like breadcrumbs.

One day, he held me while I cried and whispered,
“I don’t want to become the kind of man that hurts you.”

And I remember thinking:
Then why does loving you feel like slowly disappearing?

I wish I could tell you this story ends with courage.
With packed bags and slammed doors and triumphant freedom.

But the truth is uglier.

I stayed long after the fear arrived.

Stayed after the apologies became repetitive.
Stayed after I started flinching at sudden movements.
Stayed after I learned love could sit in the same body as terror.

Because when you love someone deeply,
Your heart becomes disturbingly skilled at negotiating with pain.

And perhaps this is the real confession:

Part of me believed if I loved him enough,
I could love the violence out of him.

As though devotion could rehabilitate destruction.

As though women were built to bleed healing into broken men.

I know better now.

But knowing better and leaving are two different kinds of survival.

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For the mother who left

Please, if you can, hold space to forgive her. For the quiet, heavy ache of the rooms she emptied, and for those fragile winters of your youth when your heart just needed a safe place to call home, let the anger go, not for her sake, but to free yourself. She was never a monument of perfection; she was just a fragile woman traversing this overwhelming existence for the very first time, terrified and unguided. She stumbled. She made deep, catastrophic choices that left fractures in your spirit.

But behind her brokenness lies a hidden truth: if she could unravel the tapestry of time, if she could reach back and rewrite her greatest regrets, she would choose you, relentlessly, in every single lifetime. I pray you find the gentle grace to heal, so that the thought of her can finally transform into a soft, sacred space within you. Yet, if you have made the painful, necessary decision to walk through this life entirely without her, I only hope your path is gentle. May your choices be a sanctuary of peace, and may you never have to repeat the very cycles of pain she secretly wept over and prayed you would escape.

For the Mother Who Was Never There

My heart breaks so deeply for you, for the ones who never got to feel the warmth of the word mother on their lips. For the innocent souls left in the freezing, indifferent air, forced to fend for comfort and weather life's cruelest storms entirely alone. I am so incredibly sorry that you had to be your own protector before you even knew who you were.

Yet, against all odds, look at how you grew. You blossomed through the frost, scraping your knees raw in the dark just trying to find a version of love that wouldn't hurt. If that cold beginning has made you hyper-vigilant today, making it hard to trust or open your heart in relationships, please be tender with yourself. You are learning. Remember that the rarest diamonds are formed under the most crushing weight, and it is the fire that ultimately reveals their breathtaking brilliance. It is a bitter, jagged pill to swallow, but when you are ready, try to forgive the phantom of the unknown that left you behind.

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For the Mother Who Was Stolen by Death

And to the tender heart whose mother was taken away under the somber, weeping umbrella of death, please forgive her. Not for leaving you behind to navigate this world alone, but forgive the cruel timing of it all. Instead, hold onto the profound reverence of her final choice: she chose to breathe her last not in a cold, sterile room, but safely anchored right there in your arms.

She chose to begin her journey into the unknown with you by her side, and she chose your face to be her final view of earth. That is a love that death cannot erase. May her beautiful soul rest gently now in the quiet, tranquil waters of eternal peace. She may no longer walk beside you in the flesh, and you may miss her voice in the quiet hours of the night, but she has never truly left. Her love remains a protective, invisible canopy, watching over every step you take.

So with or without her, you are still deeply loved.

And perhaps the tenderness you spent your whole life searching for is already living within you, revealed every time you choose softness in a world that taught you hardness, every time you nurture another soul despite knowing what it feels like to go without.

You will become home for others.
And that, too, is a kind of inheritance.

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Today, I mourned the girl I used to be.

I felt her disappear quietly beneath the weight of loving someone who only knew how to take. The light in my eyes, the one that once danced so effortlessly, dimmed without warning, as though my soul finally grew exhausted from carrying a love that was never carried back.

How tragic it is to meet someone during the famine of your life and mistake their presence for salvation.

He arrived when I was desperate for softness, for safety, for somewhere gentle enough to rest my aching heart. And because wounded people mistake crumbs for feasts, I convinced myself that what we had was sacred. I ignored every fracture. Every silence that felt too cold. Every moment my spirit trembled trying to fit itself into spaces it was never meant to survive in.

Love turned me into a beggar at the feet of my own destruction.

I memorized the rhythm of his voice the way lonely people memorize prayers. I made a sanctuary out of his existence while slowly becoming a stranger to my own. And perhaps that is the cruelest thing about loving the wrong person, you do not notice yourself vanishing until all that remains is the ghost of who you once were.

I kept waiting for him to become the man my heart wrote poetry about. But no amount of devotion can transform emotional absence into love. No amount of hope can force someone to hold your heart gently when they were never taught how.

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Still, I stayed.

Stayed through the uncertainty. Stayed through the aching. Stayed through the unbearable loneliness of lying beside someone who could touch my skin but never truly reach my soul.

And now I sit here grieving someone who is still alive.

Not because I miss who he was, but because I miss who I became when I believed he loved me. I miss the innocence of my own hope. The version of me that still believed love meant safety instead of survival.

But perhaps the saddest realization of all is this:

The spark did not die suddenly.

It died slowly each time I abandoned myself to keep the relationship alive. Each compromise became another funeral for the woman I was becoming. Each silence became another wound I called “understanding.” Each disappointment became something I swallowed whole because I was too afraid to lose what was already destroying me.

And perhaps that was the tragedy of it all:
he did not shatter my heart in a single moment.
He simply loved me in ways that taught my soul
to fracture itself in silence.

Hurt.

How many times must I contort myself to fit inside a box never crafted for me? There is a quiet sorrow in becoming someone I scarcely recognize simply to remain desirable to those I long to keep beside me. I look at my reflection and see nothing but deception, a woman betraying the very soul entrusted to her. I cannot allow this to be my ending. This hollow existence is not the life I envisioned for myself.

How does one relinquish the life they have survived in order to become who they truly are?

I crave a life untouched by constant performance, a life unburdened and free. Yet, slowly, almost rhythmically, I feel myself withering away, my thoughts, my ambitions, my vision, my very being. I have become an obstacle within my own existence. It is not that I am lacking. It is not that I am unworthy. I know the magnitude of all I could become. But what becomes of beauty when its only witness is the person who possesses it?

I need to prove to myself that I can exist without them, yes, them. I hope one day my soul forgives me for the endless betrayals committed in the name of longing. I hope it finds enough tenderness within its wounded depths to understand that I am merely a young girl trying to navigate a world so acquainted with suffering.

Perhaps I am enough. Yet loneliness has become my most intimate punishment.

How much more must I surrender to be seen? To be loved? A dime? A dream? A life?

There is always sacrifice attached to yearning, always a price demanded by affection. And if love requires fragments of my soul in exchange for visibility, then perhaps I have already sworn myself into that ruin, willingly dissolving pieces of who I am simply for the chance to be noticed.

The cries.
The screams.
The echoes that never truly leave.

Stop.

A whisper at first.

Then louder.

Stop. Please. I’m hurting.

But the darkness never listens.

My heart pounded so violently against my chest I could hear it, not just feel it, but hear the dreadful trembling beneath my skin, like a body trying to escape itself. Sweat clung to me in cold waves, drenching my shirt while my hands gripped the pillow beneath me as though it alone could anchor me to reality.

Air.
I needed air.

Just one full breath. One merciful gulp large enough to convince me I was still alive.

My eyes darted wildly through the room, searching desperately for anything that wasn’t swallowed by darkness. A crack of light. A silhouette. Something.

I need light.

The words escaped me like a prayer abandoned halfway to heaven.

I screamed anyway. Called out anyway. Hoping, despite knowing fully well there was no one on the other side of my suffering. Still, some fragile part of me waited for rescue, for a hand to pull me out of myself like a damsel trapped beneath her own ruins.

How many times must a person wage war against their own mind before one side finally surrenders?

How do you separate your soul from the body carrying all the damage? And what happens when that side wins?

Yes.
That side.

The one lurking quietly beneath every attempt at healing. The one fed by suppressed scars and buried memories.

I tell myself they are only dreams, but dreams do not leave fingerprints on the mind this way. Dreams do not follow you into daylight. These are the consequences of wounds left to rot in silence, pain so deeply buried it learned how to breathe beneath my skin.

Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to reach a state of complete emptiness. A place untouched by memory, untouched by fear, untouched even by myself.

To become nothing.
To dissolve into an obtuse darkness where feeling no longer exists.

Because how does one turn it off?

That switch.

The one that transforms every night into a descent through hell itself. The one that makes sleep feel less like rest and more like falling endlessly into the deepest parts of your own mind.

At this point, I need no enemies.

My downfall lives within me, inside the hollow echoes of I should have, I did, and the unbearable punishment of now I watch.