and yet i grieve her

the way people grieve ruined cathedrals—

still standing,

but emptied of the thing that made them holy.

she is in our hometown

washing rice, folding clothes,

asking if we have eaten enough,

while entire versions of herself

rot quietly beneath the floorboards of duty.

sometimes i catch it—

a flicker in her face

when she speaks about the girl she was

before we arrived like small hungers

with school uniforms and fevers

and mouths always opening for more.

god, i did not know

that childhood feeds on mothers.

i did not know

that every comfort she gave us

was cut from the fabric of her own life,

that while i was becoming a person

she was becoming less of one.

and the cruelest part is this:

she loves us enough

to call the ruin worth it.

meanwhile i stand here

twenty-something years later,

holding the unbearable inheritance

of finally seeing her—

not as “mom,”

but as a woman

who disappeared so slowly

no one noticed until her exhaustion

became the atmosphere of the house.

i want to return her to herself.

i want to hand back the years

like stolen objects.

her sleep.

her laughter.

the life she kept postponing

until postponement became permanent.

but all i can do

is watch her carry love

like a wound that never closed,

and understand too late

that some mothers spend their whole lives

dying in ways gentle enough

it was only decay with intention.

smoke for breath,

liquor for silence,

pills for forgetting.

i stopped sleeping

so i wouldn’t meet myself.

i fed my grief everything

except what it needed.

now even my body refuses me—

hunger gone,

peace gone,

as if it were a small obedience to living.

the machine took everything from me —

the shirts, the quiet,

the last clean pieces of myself —

and spun them into a single, dizzying motion.

i stood there, exhausted,

a body already wrung out,

watching it turn and turn

like something trapped behind glass.

it was not my intention

to think of endings.

yet the drum kept circling

like a closed world,

like time rehearsing its own collapse.

suddenly the fear rose —

sharp, uninvited —

the thought of the end of everything,

how easily it could arrive

without asking.

and i,

fixed in that fluorescent room,

could do nothing

but watch

as the world reduced itself

if solitude is the life you have written for me,

then quiet this aching need to be loved.

teach my heart to rest

in the silence you have given it,

to stop reaching

for hands that never arrive.

if i must walk alone,

let the longing grow still —

like a prayer

that has finally learned

now even that privilege seems withdrawn. existence has grown indifferent to my presence. it no longer bothers to disturb me with torment, as though it has quietly concluded that i am not worth the effort.

perhaps this is the true demotion in living: not despair, but the moment beyond it, where even anguish loses interest. pain once proved that life still had a use for me. now it passes by without recognition, like a stranger who does not remember ever having known you.

i begin to suspect that suffering itself is a form of grace — the last acknowledgment that one still occupies a place in the order of things. when even misery abandons you, you discover the gravest poverty: to exist without consequence, without disturbance, without being worth the cruelty of the universe.

but some days

it feels like my body

is trying to escape me

small chalk planets

meant to steady my orbit.

still, something in me recoils —

as if the body resents being bargained with.

there is a courtroom in my abdomen.

fear prosecutes.

ambition testifies.

sleep never arrives to adjourn.

i do not break loudly.

i erode.

i am a building

kept upright by habit and will,

while something patient and pale