lost and never found

while everyone checks the weather and shrugs.

My mind is an abandoned house,

every room flooded with unfinished tomorrows.

Mud sleeps between the floorboards,

holding the footprints of days I couldn’t survive properly.

My eyes are windows left facing the storm,

so accustomed to grey they no longer expect sunrise.

They call me sunshine,

long after the sky has fallen silent.

But now I build with stronger bricks,

and I thanked them for a feast.

I gathered scraps with trembling hands,

I’d call the version of me

who wasn’t afraid to love loudly.

Because if the world was ending,

Thank you, I’m glad you like them.

No bending my voice to soften their pride.

No asking for crumbs of love misread.

No shrinking myself to fit what they said.

No proving my worth, no ache in my chest.

It comes without pleading,

it stays without test.

And now I stand certain.

chosen, not chased.

Loved without asking.

a black bird trembling in the hush of my lungs.

Unheld, I am already learning the language of drowning.

Somewhere,

My mind is a room that refuses to go dark.

The light buzzes like tired wiring that will not switch off.

The air feels rationed, as if the windows were sealed shut.

The walls seem closer than they were yesterday.

Stress moves like a slow leak in the ceiling.

It is not loud, but it is constant.

It gathers quietly in the corners of my chest.

Small things swell inside me like wood left in water.

They press against my ribs until there is no space left.

My body reacts before my thoughts can reason.

My heart sounds like an alarm in an empty building.

My breath feels borrowed and incomplete.

I brace as if something is burning.

But nothing is on fire.

It is only my mind overheating in silence.

Exhaustion hangs on me like wet cloth stitched to bone.

It clings as if it has memorized my shape.

It refuses to dry.

My lungs feel lined with powdered glass.

It is too fine to see, but sharp enough to cut.

Every inhale feels slightly fractured.

I move carefully inside myself.

I step around my own thoughts like cracked tiles.

I fear one wrong idea will split me open.

The room inside my chest feels larger now.

It also feels colder.

My chest is an empty house after someone left suddenly.

The furniture remains, but the warmth has gone.

The air stands still.

My head hums like faulty wiring behind thin walls.

The sound never fully stops.

It only lowers its volume.

I break quietly.

The cracks are thin but spreading.

Nothing dramatic falls.

It is a slow collapse.

Beam by beam.

Sleep feels like a master switch.

I do not want dreams.

I want the current cut.

I want silence that does not vibrate.

I want stillness that does not prepare for impact.

I want to be a body at rest,

not a shoreline waiting for waves

But where is that,

when my veins have already spilled their last red prayer?

Where is that,

when my mind withers like cloth torn at the edges,

yet my heart still drums against the silence?

Where is that,

when my body is stone,

and my eyes are rivers that only flow toward the ceiling’s blank sky?

Where is that,

when my chest thirsts for comfort

like a dying man reaching for water?

Where do I go?

“They placed me in vases, whispered how pretty I was.”

“Then they forgot me the moment I stopped blooming.”

The flower let out a sigh in despair.

“I was never loved,” said the weed.

“They pulled me out before I could even grow.”

“Too wild, too unwanted, too much.”

“Funny,” the flower whispered, “we both ended up here.”

“Discarded when we no longer served them.”

“We were either too much or not enough.”

I bleed.

When I’m breaking,

I pour onto a paper.

With a heavy heart,

and quiet pain.

Words instead of tears.

Ink instead of sobs.

I write.

i’m too soft

too kind

but rain

never stops falling

just because it hurts

they pluck my petals

call it love

then walk away

leave me in pieces

still

i bloom through concrete

with roots that remember

And it’s been echoing ever since.

Like a soft knock at the back of my mind.

Maybe that’s what it was.

Maybe they just didn’t want me enough

Not the way I wanted them.

Not in the way that sees all your chaos and still stays.

Not in the way that holds space for your silence, your spirals, your sudden bursts of everything.

They say love is patient. But maybe theirs just ran out.

And all I got was a half-finished version of something that was never meant to be whole.

Maybe I was a wildfire, and they only ever came looking for candlelight.

I press the wand to my lips,

I overdo it.

pink on pink,

like plaster on cracked walls.

Then wipe just enough

to leave a break,

a place where grief can breathe.

Pink on pink

to keep from looking as hollow

as I feel.

Some days,

I hate my face.

So I gloss the mouth,

as if shine could mean alive.

Strawberries linger ;

sweet, then spoiled,

rotting somewhere between

chest and throat.

Ten years ago,

I lost a version of me.

She felt warm,

like chocolate milk cupped in cold hands.

I still wear the gloss.

Still reapply the grief,

like a ritual,

like a prayer.

The sweetness fades,

but the gloss stays.

Lips too shiny

to speak

The road looked at me

like an old friend I hadn’t seen in years.

Three years ago,

my body broke.

Ankle. Thigh. Silence.

I used to run

when the world felt too loud.

And then -

nothing.

Today, I laced up

without thinking.

I ran.

My ankle whispered.

My knee remembered.

Fifteen minutes later,

I stopped and cried.

Not from pain.

But because something in me felt content .

I had run.

That’s what we were.

Each of us clinging to some invisible thread, giving life one last chance not out of hope, but because we had nowhere else to go.

I remember how my mind wouldn’t stay still.

It wandered, circled, then collapsed into itself.

I questioned my existence like a song stuck on repeat.

Was healing even possible?

Was I too far gone to ever feel whole again?

And then he said something that made everything shift.

Something simple, but it cracked me open.

Wounds may not be your fault, but holding the thread and needle, that’s on you.

This realisation landed like a quiet earthquake.

For years, I had been carrying arrows in my chest.

Each one thrown with precision,

each one carving a story into my ribs.

And somehow, I mistook the bleeding for belonging.

I let the wounds fester like unanswered letters, sealed, ignored, and screaming.

That day, I didn’t magically heal.

But I stopped waiting for someone else to do it for me.

I picked up the shattered pieces of myself, not to be whole again,

but to learn how light still passes through broken glass.

They tried to turn my heart into ruin.

Built storms inside me, left behind debris.

But pain had a voice, and it whispered, “Begin.”

Grief stood beside me, silent, but no longer in control.

Hope returned, not loudly, just as a hand on my back.

I rose. I rebuilt. I remembered. I returned.

I rose not to be who I was, but to become someone softer, wiser.

And if my soul was a house,

it had once collapsed

but I swept the dust, patched the cracks, lit a candle in every room.

I stopped waiting for rescue.

I became the architect of my own quiet resurrection.

And in the wreckage,