I think I’m done. Or nearly there.
I’m exhausted, by all of this, and by them.
This whole thing has brought everything into focus.

I’m done taking care of everyone and everything else before myself.
I’m done being told who I am,
having my motives dissected,
assumptions laid on me like a second skin I never asked for.

They don’t follow through.
So I won’t keep moving just to hold everything together.
I acted when no one else would.
Took the heat when others disappeared.
There is no blame.
We each are who we are.

When everyone looked lost
when they turned to me,
I told myself, someone had to do it.
I chose peace, even if it meant pieces of me broke away.

I took risks,
for love, for others, for the chance of something better.
And in doing so, I unraveled.
I lost myself.
I became no one.

But they underestimated me.
Especially my strength.
They labeled me, then left me behind.

So I’m walking away.
From their assumptions, their definitions of me.
From the box they tried to fit me in.

My trauma didn’t cause my illness,
but it carved deeper wounds into the ones I already carry.
And now, I’m at a loss.

But I know what I know.
I feel and see things they can’t.
I tried to change things,
mostly alone.

And I’ve learned:
True freedom sometimes means going it alone.

I don’t want to be analyzed, dissected, or explained.
I’ve already been overlooked.
Dismissed.
Cast aside.

They acted like I had nothing to offer.
And I believed them, for a while.
Not anymore.

I will no longer accept someone else’s version of me,
Just because they say it with confidence.

They told me I was wrong.
But it was just what they wanted to believe.

No more.

(For my big sis Moe)

---

I don’t know if you realized that you helped me,

and you still do.
You held me when I needed it most
and made me feel safe.

I’ve always looked up to you.
Your strength is admirable,
fierce and defiant,
like a fire that refuses to be extinguished.

You protected me,
not just as my big sister,
but as my best friend.
You saw the cracks in me
before I even knew they were there.
And you stood in them,
shielding me from breaking.

And still,
you laugh with me like we’re kids again.
You sit beside my pain
without trying to fix it.
You just stay.
And that’s more than most ever do.

You didn’t flinch when I unraveled.
You never looked away from my mess.
You remind me of who I am and who I was
when I forgot.
You taught me how to fight.
not with fists,
but with courage,
with presence,
with love that doesn’t back down.

In the darkest rooms,
you were the light at the door.
Not perfect, not polished,
but real,
and strong in a way the world
doesn’t always understand.

You are my anchor,
my example,
my safe place.

Thank you
for being
everything.

(For Marg)

I miss you constantly.
I have for years now.
You’ve been my other half,
for as long as I can remember.
My sister, my best friend,
my mirror, and my touchstone.

Some days, I don’t know
how I survive
without you here.

It feels like a piece of my soul is missing.

There are moments
when the silence is too loud,
and I wish I could reach across the miles
just to hear your laugh,
to sit beside you,
to feel the calm that only you bring.

We speak in glances,
finish each other’s sentences,
wrap entire conversations
into a single raised eyebrow.
Now, the phone tries to carry what it can,
but it’s never enough.

I miss the small things the most.
Coffee together in the morning,
late-night talks in pajamas.
The unspoken comfort
of simply knowing
you were close by.

Life keeps moving,
but a part of me feels paused.
Waiting for the chapter
when we find our way back
to the same city,
the same sky,
the same rhythm.

I know there will be a day
when we no longer live so far apart.
I hold onto that like a promise.
Because if there isn’t,
if this distance never closes,
I don’t think my heart,
nor yours,
could take the weight.

Even across all this space,
you’re still my home.
And one day,
I’ll walk through the door,
you’ll be there,
and it will feel like it should.

I want my time back.
The mornings that didn’t begin in dread,
the nights that closed softly,
instead of swallowing me whole.
Time that wasn’t spent
negotiating with pain,
or bargaining with exhaustion.

I want my health back.
Not just the absence of illness,
but the presence of ease.
The ability to move, to breathe,
to exist in my body
without resentment,
without fear.

I want my body back.
The one I could trust,
the one I didn’t have to explain,
defend, or apologize for.
I miss the days
when I didn’t wake up
attempting to measure
my own limits
before I even stood up.

I want my smile back.
Not the tired, polite one
I give the world,
but the one that used to
rise naturally,
unprovoked,
honest.

But more than anything,
I want my mind back.

My clarity.
My rhythm.
My ability to stay
with a thought long enough
to follow it somewhere new.
I want my focus,
my memory,
my peace.
I miss feeling like myself
inside my own head.

Lately,
I feel caught in a loop of
grief, numbness, anger,
hope, shadowed by sadness,
then grief again.
Each day a copy
of a day I didn’t want
to begin with.

Only time will tell
when this fog will lift,
and if I’ll return to myself
or become someone else entirely.

But this can’t continue.
It’s maddening to feel this trapped.
To watch life moving forward
like I’ve been left behind
inside a version of me
I feel I was never meant to become.

Mom, I miss you.

I miss the way you could make me feel safe, even if those moments were rare, fleeting and didn’t last.

Even if there were more times I felt scared of you, I still miss how your arms felt around me when you hugged me as I broke beneath the weight of it all.

When the world felt too heavy you still had this ability to make it feel manageable.

You had this way that could pick me up when I fell to pieces on the ground.

In those moments it seemed you finally let that wall around you fall also.

When you stopped being cold, harsh, and scary.

When you stopped the pain by letting yourself feel mine.

There were times you made it ok for me to crumble. There were moments when you felt like home.

Like you were the only person who could see how much I was hurting.

But you also hurt me.

A lot.

Leaving too many scars to count.

And I’ve spent years trying to understand how both of those things could be true.

How both could exist.

Nightmares of you plague my sleep.

Memories I wish I could burn from my brain still swirl around in my mind.

Memories that haunt me, that I wish weren’t real.

Sometimes I wish I could forget how comforting your voice could be and those moments you held me when I was sick or scared.

Because remembering it hurts and makes the loss feel even deeper.

I needed you to protect me. To help me.
I needed you to love me in a way that didn’t also break me.
I needed you to choose me over the drugs, over the alcohol, over the pain.

And still, now, I don’t understand why at this moment, in this hospital, with all the fear and pain I’m feeling tonight, scared for tomorrow’s outcome. It’s suddenly you that I want to hug me, and reassure me as you did in those rare moments.

The moments I saw glimpses of the real you.

The moments you acted like a mother.

I carry both the comfort and the pain you gave me.
I carry the love and the loss.

But I will not let the hurt you inflicted upon me, define me.
And I will not keep breaking just to keep your memory alive as you choose to fade away.

As you choose to die.

I needed you but you weren’t there the way I needed, and not the way you should have.

You used my pain to get what you wanted.

But I’m still here.

I survived you,

And still love you.

I’m still breathing.

I’m still trying.

And that is enough.

Echoes of me haunt me.

My scars are all out in the open.
While my soul lies dying within.
A smile helps pretend that I’m coping,
Yet in the morning, the birds still don’t sing.

In my mind, there are echoes still shouting.
A mirage of who I once used to be.
The dark thoughts leave me doubting.
In the shadows… is that really me?

I’ll wander down roads for the answer,
For what leaves me so broken inside.

Chasing the light, in case it’s healing.
But I’ll learn in the darkness, the truth tends to hide.

In that darkness, I start to crumble.
My body left a bare, empty shell.
I’ll hear the drums of war begin to rumble.
There, within my own personal hell.

But even in ash, there is ember,
A flicker refusing to die.
Though the dark tries hard to dismember,
There’s strength in each tear that I cry.

The mirror may still show the shadows,
But they no longer define my name.
I walk through the weight of the sorrows,

I rise, and I’m never the same.

Now dawn whispers softly in my silence,
The stillness is no longer my foe.
From ruin, I forged my defiance.
And carry a light all my own.

Stay away from anyone who reminds you
how much they “took care of you”
when you were at your lowest.
Especially when your pain
was never something you chose.

Love doesn’t keep score.
Real care doesn’t come with receipts.
If someone feels the need to remind you,
what they’re really saying is:
they know they didn’t show up
in the way you needed.
Not like you would have for them.

It’s not love.
It’s not memory.
It’s manipulation,
a desperate attempt
to convince both you and themselves
that they were better
than they truly were.

But once you see it for what it is,
a twisted retelling of your suffering
to protect their own comfort,
you finally see them
clearly.

The pain makes me feel
    trapped,
and I want to scream.

    I want to claw and scratch my way
    out of my body
    to escape it.
But I’m imprisoned within,
    forever.

A terror,
an absolute panic,
    wells up in my chest
    knowing there’s no way out.

There is no room
    to just live
with this oppressive
    and torturous monster
in my body.

A monster that wraps
    barbed wire
around my vertebrae
    and my intestines.
It taunts me
    with all I can’t do.

The pain comes in waves,
    swelling, crashing,
    then lingering.

Then suddenly constant
    and so sharp
it takes my breath away.

With shallow breath,
it brings absolute desperation with it.
They join,
    and they tear me apart.

Words
    will never
        do it justice.

It is
    madness,
and I’m not okay.

I’m not okay,
    and I want to flee.

Yet there is nothing I can think to do
except
    cut and burn my skin
        to the bone
in a vain attempt
    to kill
this ever-present,
    internal,
    invisible,
    traumatic,
    wretched
    fuck
    of a pain.

Sadness has a heartbeat, too.
Slow, gentle, and aching.
Listen carefully,
profound wisdom is hidden in that rhythm.
It doesn’t scream like joy
or shout like anger.
It simply beats.
A soft pulse beneath everything,
a quiet companion that walks beside you, barefoot.

Some days,
it hums in your chest like a lullaby.
Not to soothe, but to remind you:
you are still here.
Still breathing.
Still feeling.
Still human.

It echoes through the hollow spaces,
where laughter once lived,
where dreams once sang.
It curls up in the silence,
folds itself into the pause between thoughts.

But if you sit with it.
Not to fix, not to flee,
you might hear its language.
Not made of words.
But of memories.
Of unmet longings.
Of things that mattered deeply.

Sadness is not the enemy.
It is the historian of your heart,
archiving every tenderness you dared to feel.
And in that heartbeat, slow and aching,
there is a strange kind of grace.
The grace of having loved enough
to feel this way.

So listen.
Even pain has poetry.
And somewhere in the ache,
you may find a piece of yourself
you had forgotten was still alive

I walk through life in ghostskin,
a shimmer no one sees.
The world hums somewhere far away.
I’m not part of it.
I was never stitched into the fabric.
Never anchored, never held.

I laugh on cue.
I say the right things.
But my voice echoes
from underwater halls.
Where pain grows, moss on the walls
and no one visits.

I could disappear
and nothing would shift.
No wind would notice,
no tide would turn.
Because I already don’t exist
in the way others do.

I am not broken yet.
but I am not okay.
I am trying
to breathe
with lungs that never quite
believed in air.

And still, somehow,

I remain.

It’s a constant hum beneath the noise.
Grief threaded through the days.
Longing stitched into the hours.
But I’ve learned to fold it small,
tuck it beneath my ribs,
hide it.
Just to move,
just to breathe.

But sometimes
it rises up,
flooding the quiet I worked so hard to build.
It whispers my name
with a softness I still remember,
with the warmth I crave
from the mother I needed.

She’s not dead,
but I miss her.
Still.

Even after the damage.
Even after the chaos and the screams.
Even after the abuse.
Even after the silence.
And all the ways
she taught me to disappear.

Ashamed of my ache,
I carry it quietly.
This love that bruises,
and cuts so deep.
This longing that won’t die.
A lonely burden
no one sees.

And still,
a part of me wants to reach for her
just once more.
In hopes of seeing the real her again,
to finally feel seen by her.

And to be loved by her,
in a way I never truly got.

I can’t minimize the hurt,
and I can’t erase the love either.
I have to let both exist
side by side,
living in me.

Maybe that’s where true courage lies.
Not in choosing one over the other,
but in allowing both to be there.
In stopping fear
from convincing me
that I have to pick.
That I’ll feel less pain
if I just choose.

For so long, I have believed I had to.
That holding on to love
meant denying the pain,
and that feeling the hurt
meant letting go
of what was good.
But now I see,
that’s not how it works at all.

It’s not about choosing.
It’s about learning to live
in the in-between.
The space where love and loss,
joy and sorrow,
pain and relief
all have a place.

Maybe that’s where
real healing happens.
And maybe,
that’s where I’ll find myself again.

Not by turning away,
but by holding it all.
No matter what.
This is how I begin
to move forward again.

Maybe wholeness
isn’t about healing perfectly,
but about learning
to carry it all with grace.
And learning
when to reach out for help.

Not waiting
until the pain
or desperation
makes the choice
for me.