You may think it doesn’t show,
but I see it.

 
Each time she asks for help,
a help she hasn’t deserved from you for years now,
I feel the weight it leaves upon you.

 
I would never judge you.
You’ve never judged me.

 
That’s love.
Quiet, loyal,
even when it hurts.

 
But your anger smolders beneath your skin,
your frustration flickers
like embers beneath ash,
when you answer her calls,
carry her burdens,
and stand by someone
who stop standing by you a long time ago.

 
She has everything.
You have so little for yourself,
and still,
you give.

 
Because that’s who you are
smteady, unshakable,
still standing
after decades of what always has felt like insanity to us all. 

 
I love you for it,
but it breaks my heart to watch .

 
At times watching you unravel,
into quiet despair,
disintegrating
into a sadness
I think you mistake for calm.

 
And still,
I wish you could see yourself
as I see you.

 
How strong you are,
for surviving her cruelty,
for keeping your decency
in the shadow of her destruction.

 
There have been so many times
I’ve wanted to say,
“But you need you more.”

 
Yet the words stayed behind my teeth.

 
The ache lingers.
Not for her,
but for the light
she hasn’t stopped fading in you.

 
Maybe one day,
you’ll stop answering her calls,
and the silence
will sound like freedom.

 
Maybe one day,
you’ll choose yourself
without apology.

 
     Until then,
     I’ll keep loving you,
     sad, defiant, tender, alive.

 
         Believing
         that someday
         you’ll see
         what I’ve always known,
         you haven’t been the broken one.

There is a sinking feeling
I cannot always outrun.

It steals moments
before I can fully live inside them.
Turning my mind
into a place of worry
and quiet fear.

This fear is different.
It comes from reality.
The kind that reminds me
life doesn’t ask permission.

Does it always have to hit like a brick?

Does it always have to take
what I treasure most?

Memories of when things were lighter?

Moments so perfect
I wish I could bottle them,
unscrew the lid,
and step back inside?

The weight changes how I breathe.

A pressure on my chest
that whispers:
‘you are trapped.’

The past churns my stomach.
Truths sit heavy.
Fear is the only thing
that still speaks clearly.

I suddenly don’t remember pure joy anymore.
That weightless arrival.
That sudden lift.

So I temporarily choose numbness.
It’s safer.
Because the darkness always comes.
No matter how hard I try to escape it.

It waits.

It watches.

It thinks it will win.

And sometimes, it does.

But not like before.
Not completely.
I see it now.
My ability to fully fight back.

Now I win more often than it does.

And even when I lose,
it never takes me
the way it once did.

I bend now,
instead of breaking.

It’s so easy for them to say
what you should do.
Who to walk away from,
Who to forgive, who not to.

They tell you how you should heal. How you should cope. As if they know. And it’s all said very clearly like an insinuation that implies you aren’t trying or doing enough.

They want you to be over it,
but it still finds you in the quiet hours.
They tell you to push through
things they’ve never had to survive.
They treat your sadness, your grief, your pain
like they should come with a time limit.
They make it seem like weakness.

They don’t like what they don’t understand,
and it shows in the way
they flinch at your truth.

You unsettle them.
Your feelings, your words,
the way you turn your scars into poems.

Your honesty frightens them.
Your light,
your darkness,
the way you still love deeply
after everything.

But you’ve stopped hiding.
You’ve stopped apologizing for things that aren’t your fault.
For feeling too much, most of all.
You know now
this heart of yours,
this wild, open thing,
isn’t a flaw to fix.

Life is too short
to cage what makes you real
and attempt to silence what makes you human.

I could never have imagined myself here,
or the things I would go through.
Not just with my health,
not just the hospital stays,
but everything that unraveled around me.

A big part of my world fell apart.
Even though it was me who walked away,
I still hate it,
because I adored that person.

But as my health declined,
I was forced to see things
I had ignored for too long.
Truths I wasn’t ready to face.
And in that seeing,
something shifted.

It took being broken open
to understand what I truly needed.

Peace that wasn’t conditional,
love that didn’t drain me,
and a gentler way to exist
inside my own skin.

There were days
I didn’t think I’d make it.
Pain became my language,
silence my shelter.
But somewhere in that wreckage,
something began to grow.
Quietly, steadily,
impossibly strong.

I started to find myself again.
Not the version shaped by others,
but the one I buried to survive.
The one who still believes
in joy,
in connection,
in starting over.

Now, standing here,
I can finally say,
every heartbreak,
every wound,
every sleepless night
brought me closer
to this version of me.

The one who’s learning to breathe again,
who sees beauty in the scars,
and knows
that sometimes,
falling apart
is the only way
to come home
to yourself.

This past year, I was breaking.
Over and over again.
Body, mind, and spirit unraveling all at once.
Each hospital stay blurred into the next,
and pain became a language I understood way too well.
The world I’d built collapsed beside my health,
leaving me unsure who I was without it.

Back then, the days were heavy,
the nights darker still.
I truly believed I might never rise again.
But even in that darkness,
something small within me held on.
A quiet, stubborn voice that whispered, keep going.

Now, standing here, I see it all differently.
Every wound served a purpose.
Every breakdown carved space for growth.
Every loss became an opening for peace.

I wouldn’t change a thing.
Not the pain, not the fear, not my mistakes,
not even the moments that nearly broke me.
Because each one led me here.
They stripped away what wasn’t meant to stay
and left me lighter, clearer, free.

Today, I feel alive again.

Better and stronger with every day that passes.
Hope now stirs softly beneath my skin.
I see beauty in myself
and in the world around me.
And I understand now, I see it.
That it all happened for a reason.
Every step, even the hardest ones,
brought me some kind of peace.

You spent years trying to make me small.
To make me doubt what I saw,
what I knew,
who I was.

Before the violence, there was the addiction.
The slow unraveling.
The way it hollowed you out
until the person I needed
was barely there.
If at all.

After I got sick,
you used my pain to feed your need.
To justify, to take, to abuse.
You turned my disease into your source

And your excuse.

Too often, love became your currency.
And not trusting you, became my survival.

I learned too young
that even suffering could be stolen.

Then came the rage,
the fear that filled every room.
I learned early
that love could hurt.
That safety wasn’t guaranteed.
That silence was the best way.

But I’m not that child anymore.
The one who believed every viscous lie
you whispered and screamed.
The one who thought your anger was truth.

I’m becoming proud of myself now.
For surviving, for unlearning,
for finding peace in the spaces
where your echoes used to live.
I see now that what you called love,
was control, wearing a familiar face.

Still, I hope your soul is changing.
I hope you find your own kind of peace
in the places where pain has lived too long.

I hope that you are praying.

I have forgiven you.
But not for you. 
For me.
There are no more monsters from you left in my heart.
The ones you planted
when I was still a child
have finally gone quiet.

I am no longer afraid of you.
I’ve let you go.
And as I move forward,
I carry no hate.
Only a strange, steady love.

The kind that says,

I love you,
but from a very necessary distance.

I used to think
if I could just find the right words,
the right tone,
the right version of myself,
maybe she’d see me.
Truly hear me.
And she’d stop.

But she never did.
She only saw
what she could use.

My illness became her ticket,
my pain,
her proof.

I was thirteen,
and already learning
that love could be a weapon.
Especially with her.

I learned
that love could bruise,
that “no” could be dangerous,
that my sudden defiance
could split skin.
My skin.

Silence was safer
than truth.
It became my survival.

I watched her
rewrite every boundary
until none of us
were real anymore.
Just ghosts
she borrowed
to feed her need.

Over two decades later,
her body is catching up
to what her spirit
decided long ago.

Her heart now damaged,
her skin starting to turn gray,
her words
sharp and slurred.
Every breath
another borrowed second
from a life
she’s burning through.

She has chosen this.
She chose the lies.
She chose to fade
long before her body began to.

Even when she was handed
a way out,
a rare chance,
she said no,
and kept running.
Straight towards the bottle,
towards the pills.

And it hit me so hard
my chest almost hurt.
But I finally accepted it.
It took me years
to see it clearly.
She made her choice
long ago.

A choice
she has always made.
And that choice
wasn’t me.
It wasn’t us.
She blamed us instead.

For over twenty-five years,
she has never picked us.

Now she’s chosen
to die slowly,
to disappear
by degrees.
To keep burning herself
and calling it living,
calling it warmth.

I can’t save her.
I can’t drag her
to the surface.
I’ve tried.

And I refuse
to let her cruelty
and darkness
drag me under
with her.

Never again.

I can only mourn
what could’ve been.
The mother I remembered before,
and the mother I imagined.

Mourn the love
that never learned to stay.

Letting go isn’t hate.
It’s mercy.
It’s survival.
It’s love, rewritten
in self-protection’s language.

My mother
is a brutal storm
I never want
to survive again.

Her love
isn’t what love should be.
It became violent,
vicious,
and frightening
most of the time.

I will always care.
I will always love her.
That will never change,
despite everything.

But I don’t think
I’ll ever stop grieving her
and all that she’s destroyed
over the years.

I had to let her go.
Not out of hate,
but out of self-preservation.

Because love
isn’t meant
to be swallowed
with poison.

I deserve
to live
in a house,
in a world,
not built
from someone else’s destruction.

There are days I know, without a doubt,
that my dog, Milo, has kept me alive.
Through pain, through illness,
through the kind of darkness
that makes you forget who you are.

His love is pure.
Steady and uncomplicated.
He doesn’t need to understand the details
to know when I’m hurting.
He just knows.

When I’m sick, he stays close.
Not out of duty, but devotion.
He lies beside me, his body pressed against mine,
steady as breath.
Something in that simple nearness softens everything.
Most of all the ache, the fear, and
the loneliness that never quite leaves.

It’s as if he knows that being here is enough.
That his quiet presence speaks louder
than words ever could.
Sometimes he looks at me
with those deep, knowing eyes,
and I swear he’s saying,
“I’ve got you. Rest now.”

He senses what I can’t always name,
despair, sadness, pain,
and meets it with love.
One that asks for nothing in return.
There’s no judgment in him,
no hesitation.
Just a calm, certain kind of love
that holds me together
when I start to fall apart.

He has taught me what grace truly looks like.
Not grand or perfect,
but loyal, patient, and real.

Because of him, I’ve learned to stay.
To keep fighting.
To see myself the way he does,
through his eyes.
With love and compassion.
Instead of criticism and hate.

He helps me believe that I’m worth it.
Worth that kind of love after all.
And that has saved me, again and again,
in more ways than I can ever repay.

There are two kinds of exhaustion.
The kind that comes from living.
From early mornings and late nights,
from lists that never end,
and days that run together.
It’s the kind that a good night’s sleep can soften,
that time or quiet can eventually mend.

And then there’s the other kind.
The one that lives in your bones.
It pulses beneath your skin,
weaves itself through every nerve,
and turns even rest
into another form of effort.
You wake tired.
You breathe tired.
You exist tired.

It’s not just in the body.
It’s the dull ache that settles in the mind,
the weight that drags at your spirit,
until weariness itself
becomes your constant companion.
You forget what it felt like
to move lightly through the world,
to wake unafraid of the day.

This kind of exhaustion
starts to shape you.
It drapes over you like a familiar cloak.
Soft but suffocating.
A quiet presence that never leaves.
You learn to function within it,
to smile through it,
to carry it as if it’s part of who you are.

And maybe, in some ways, it is.
It becomes a rhythm in your breath,
a language your body speaks
even when your voice stays silent.
You grow around it,
learn to live beside it,
and still, somewhere deep within,
you keep a memory of lightness.
Waiting for the day
you might feel it again.

But even here, beneath the weight,
there are moments that shimmer through.
The softness of morning light,
the rare steadiness of your own breath,
reminding you that exhaustion
is not all you are.
Somewhere inside,
the quiet part of you is healing,
slowly remembering how to rest.

And that keeps you hopeful and going.

Never giving up.

I know the way you are holding on.
So tight.
Even now, in this moment.
Each and every day, you hold on.
No matter what.
Fingers pressed into the seams of each day.
I know how hard you fight.

Often it feels like exhaustion has become a second skin.
Coming from deep inside you.
A part of your every cell.
Every breath.
Your body is heavy and your mind spins.
Restless and numb all at once.
A quiet, but also a loud ache.

Sadness and fear won’t win.
Deep within I know this to be true.
And I know you are pushing through the hours.
The minutes.
The seconds.
Through the many betrayals of sleep.
Relearning how to get up when your bones are done.
When it feels like your soul has given up.
Finished while the rest of you has to keep going.
I know you are holding way too many silent tears.
While a war wages inside of you.
A battle that you hide.
Quietly torturing your soul and mind.

I feel your pain.
I know it and that place far too well.
Where time keeps moving and the light feels far.
I know how impossible it can be sometimes,
to believe it could or will ever ease.

But it will.
I promise.

Because there will be a moment,
small or huge, that lifts your heavy heart.
You’ll breathe more deeply than you have in a long time.
It will catch you off guard.
And you’ll tightly hold it to your heart.
Then a smile will come.
One that is really you.
True, soulful, coming from deep within.

So hold on.
Keep fighting.
And when your strength runs thin, take my hand.
I’ll always be there.
With you, unshaken, believing, knowing,
that soon your next breath will be softer than the last.

When things are too still for too long,
I start to brace myself.
For the moment the bottom gives way.
For the familiar collapse.
And it always does.
It always comes.

First, a part of me crumbles with it,
Before I scold myself
for breaking, at all.

Again.

I can’t help but go numb.
My heart starts to race,
my lungs breathe shallow.

As if they too are waiting
for it all to pass,
for calm to return.

I wish I didn’t know.
I wish I couldn’t sense it.
In the way a shift in the air
warns of thunder before it cracks.

But I feel it rising,
every time,
before it descends.

And when it hits,
the weight of knowing
presses down so hard
I can hardly breathe.

It is not the blow alone that breaks me,
but the waiting.
The endless bracing.
The knowing, that it’s coming.                                                                                     

And it always does. Always.

But each time the quiet returns,
I find myself able to breathe deep once again.
And pray every time for it to last as long as it can.
As some part of me
keeps watching the horizon.
Half-living in dread,
half-living in hope,
always preparing for the fall.

Forever grateful for each quiet moment.

There’s a space between the moments.
Not quite here, not quite gone.
A place where my breath catches,
and time seems to hold its breath too.

In that space, I carry both fear and hope.
A quiet tug-of-war between wanting to let go
and desperately needing to keep holding on.

I’ve learned to meet myself there,
not with judgment,
but with patience.
Like a friend who knows my silences
and never hurries me to speak.

Because healing never arrives all at once.
It’s small steps.
Soft words I whisper to my soul,
and the permission to rest
when the world asks for more than I can give.

Some days, surviving means only existing.
Not fixing, not striving.
Just being here enough to take one more breath.

And in that breathing,
I start to remember the version of me
that lives beneath the weight.
A spark still flickers there,
quiet but certain,
Growing

So I stay in that space between the moments.
Holding both my brokenness and my strength.
Learning that even in the waiting,
peace can make a home in me.

I thought it would never let go.
The weight pressed into my bones,
nights stretched so long,
that I forgot the sound
of my own lightness.

But it didn’t stay
in the way I feared.
It loosened slowly,
a thread here,
a knot there,
until one quiet morning
I realized I could breathe
without bracing.

I remember the blur,
the endless running together,
the feeling of being
nowhere at all.
Now, there is shape again.
Not perfect.
Not whole.
But mine.

The colors that came back
weren’t the ones I remembered.
They were softer,
frayed at the edges,
but real enough to hold in my hands.

And though I know
it will unavoidably return,
I have now lived through its storm once more.
This time,
I carry both the memory of its weight
and the proof
that I can outlast it.

To be haunted,
especially by the past,
is like living with ghosts.

You become a shell of yourself,
not even knowing who you used to be.
Everything feels blurry,
faded,
and runs together.

There’s no beginning nor end.

To anything.

Then,
there comes a day,
a moment even,
when you are reminded
of your true self.

You feel alive again,
and you can’t believe
you had been living that way
for so long.

Not realizing until now that so many parts of you went dark.

Dead almost.

The ghosts of your past,
the weight of your trauma,
fade just enough
for you to breathe deep again.

You still have a long way to go.
But you feel stronger now.
Ready to face
the demons that creep in
during the darkest of moments.

Then the next time,
when those thoughts come back,
they aren’t as strong as before.

They loosen their hold on you a little.

Just enough to feel it inside.

You hold onto this feeling,
despite knowing it most likely will slip away.

But as long as you’re better off
than you were before,
that’s all that matters.

Healing isn’t linear,
and even the slowest,
smallest progress
should never be dismissed.

Life begins to feel brighter,
and somehow,
that’s enough.

Things carry meaning
they never had before.

And when you wake up each morning,
you no longer cry
at the realization
that you are still breathing.

You’re smiling instead.

Because life is beautiful.

Without darkness, there would be no light.

And that is everything sometimes.

It feels like I’m living two very different lives.

One the world can see.
Where I smile,
talk to people,
move through my day
like everything is fine.

And one no one knows,
where I carry a quiet storm
of pain,
grief,
and unspoken weight.

My heart feels heavy,
silently crying out
for comfort,
for understanding.

Balancing these two sides
is exhausting.

Every day,
the silence grows louder,
and the weight
of what I don’t say
pulls me further under.

I didn’t expect something so beautiful
to come from it all.

Not from the pain,
or the times everything inside me was breaking.
Not from the nights I couldn’t sleep,
or the moments I forgot how to hope.

But sometimes,
life plants something quietly
in the cracks left behind.

Out of nowhere,
at a time when life had sunk me so low
that I saw no way out,
I heard a voice I hadn’t heard in over two years,
but one I knew like my own.

A voice that’s known me most of my life,
and that feels like a sister.
One that, especially in that moment,
I needed more than I knew.

In an instant,
the distance melted away
as if no time had passed at all.
We laughed and talked.

We were still us.
Each weathered inside, changed.
For life had taken its toll,
but we were still the same underneath.

I suddenly felt
a certain kind of strength
I’d forgotten existed.
And that moment brought light
to a part of me
I didn’t realize had gone dark.

I hated what brought me here.
Still do sometimes.
But then I remember, I can’t hate it.
Not really.
Because it also brought us back.

And that changes the way
I see everything.

Maybe the darkest times happen
so something wonderful can.
Something that makes it worth it.

Maybe pain doesn’t cancel out joy,
it just makes us recognize it
when it arrives.

Because in life,
more often than not,
timing is everything.

I’m not healed.
Not yet.

But I’m less alone.
And now so is she.

And that, I think,
is what we both have been needing
to survive the darkness.

They said it wasn’t real.
That it was all in my head.
A child, I felt their judgment.
Their assumptions.
Like none of it mattered to so many of them.

For years, most of them never acknowledged it.
While the truth twisted
and bled in my gut.
It stole my sleep,
drained my childhood,
and left me in pain.

Only a kid, I blamed myself.
Thought I was weak.
Thought I could control it.
That somehow, I would find a way.
It wasn’t possible.
Yet still, I kept trying.
Thinking no matter what,
I could push through it on my own.

And every time I couldn’t,
every time it beat me,
I saw myself as a failure
for being unable to fix my insides.

They backed away,
one by one,
until few remained.

The rest stood back,
acting superior, smarter, better.
Always right.
Dismissive of it all,
including my mother.

Weren’t they
the first to disappear
when she became someone
none of us recognized?
When she wreaked havoc
upon our family?
On me?

I grew up
watching them care more
about appearances than truth.
More about each other’s opinions
than our struggle,
our pain.
So few ever reached out.

My family and I were the cracked mirror
they couldn’t bear to face.

But now,
now that my mother has been unraveling for years,
now that alcohol stains her every word
and eats away at her mind,
now that time is running out,
now that reality can’t be
ignored or rewritten,
they return.

With concerned eyes,
with soft voices
that try to smooth over the past.

They say they want to help.
But most seem
to be trying to quiet their own guilt
more than anything.

Otherwise, they wouldn’t
say the reckless things they say,
do the things they do,
or remain so cold.

They will never apologize
for being so wrong.
Pride and judgment
still gets in the way.

It feels like they look at my family,
and at me,
like a story they forgot to finish.

But we are not here
to be their redemption.

I see it so clearly.
And I remember it all.

I’ve always known it is real.
I’ve felt it for decades.
At times, feeling like a knife is stuck inside me.
Causing pain I could and can never fully ignore.

Their silence,
Their denial,
and their refusal to acknowledge the parts they played,
doesn’t mean it never happened.

And now that they can’t ignore it anymore,
they say they care.

Well, I see who among them
is really here.
Who is real,
and who still wears their mask.

And I find myself grateful
for those who are there.
Those who have lifted me up
instead of shutting me down,
trying to make me feel small.

Which helps me finally start
to let go.
Of the weight.
Of the pretending.
Of the rest of them.

You keep showing up.
Uninvited.
Unrelenting.
Dragging my old pain like chains across my chest.
You whisper every mistake, every moment I wasn’t enough,
as if I haven’t already bled for them.

I have survived you.
Over and over.
Even when I didn’t want to.
Even when I thought I wouldn’t.

You don’t own me anymore.
Not my thoughts, not my sleep, not the way I breathe.

I have cracked open, fallen apart,
but I am still here.
Even numb, even raw, I’m still here.

And if all I can do today is sit
until I remember how to feel again,
then that is enough.

You are the past.
I’m still choosing the present.
I’m still choosing to push through.
Even when it hurts.

Especially when it hurts.

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.