The Cruel Equation

The lighthouse dimmed at dawn.

I stopped waiting for you

to find your way back to me.

I had kept the light on too long.

Not because you asked me to,

but because you never told me not to.

You never said goodbye.

You simply became quieter,

message by message,

until one day

I realised I was speaking

to an empty horizon.

The truth is,

I am not even mad at you.

That's the hardest part of all,

because anger would be easier.

Anger would give me something to bury,

something to blame,

something solid to place between us.

Instead,

I am left with care.

Care that still catches itself

wondering how you are.

Care that still reaches for you

in moments it should know better.

Care that remains

even though you were the one

who disappeared.

You told me my intensity

was part of who I am.

You told me that the people who cared for me

should accept that.

That I should never make myself smaller

for the comfort of others.

And for a while,

I believed you.

Not because the words were beautiful,

but because they felt true coming from you.

You made me think

I had found someone

who understood the depth of me.

Someone who wouldn't mistake passion

for weakness,

or feeling deeply

for being too much.

Yet somehow,

you became another person

who left me alone with those feelings.

You taught me not to apologise

for the size of my heart,

then vanished

and left me carrying it by myself.

I think that is the part

I still cannot understand.

Not that you left.

People leave.

Not every story is meant to last.

But you never gave the story an ending.

You left it unfinished,

mid-sentence,

with no explanation,

no goodbye,

and no chance to ask why.

So I kept the lighthouse burning.

Night after night.

Telling myself that maybe you were busy.

Maybe you were struggling.

Maybe tomorrow

would be the day I heard from you again.

I mistook silence for distance.

I mistook absence for uncertainty.

I mistook hope

for a reason to keep waiting.

But eventually,

even lighthouses grow tired.

Not of shining,

but of calling out

to ships that are no longer listening.

So the lighthouse dimmed at dawn.

Not because I stopped caring.

Not because you stopped mattering.

But because I finally understood

that a beacon is meant to guide the lost,

not spend its life

begging to be seen.

And somewhere beyond the shoreline,

whether you know it or not,

the light that waited for you

has finally begun

to let itself rest.

TW: Themes of harm.

It's not normal to question whether the relationship you're in is right for you every day.

To make lists.

To weigh evidence.

To search for certainty like it's hiding somewhere just out of reach.

It's not normal.

But then again it's not normal to question every thought you have.

To have an opinion and immediately cross-examine it.

To feel something and then ask, "Is that true?"

To want something and then ask, "Do I really?"

To know something deep in your bones and still hand it over to a jury of imagined voices.

It's not normal to spend your life appealing your own decisions.

It's not normal to become so disconnected from yourself that every choice feels like a debate.

It's not normal to be five years old and take scissors to your skin.

Not because you wanted attention.

Not because you understood why.

Just because something felt so uncomfortable inside your own body that leaving it made more sense than staying.

It's not normal to learn that young that your own experience can't be trusted.

It's not normal to become an expert at overriding yourself.

To smile when you're hurting.

To stay when you want to leave.

To carry everyone else's feelings more carefully than your own.

To become so good at adapting that you forget there was ever a person underneath doing the adapting.

It's not normal to spend years asking:

What if I'm wrong?

What if I'm selfish?

What if I'm overreacting?

What if I've misunderstood?

What if everyone else can see something I can't?

What if I can't trust myself?

It's not normal.

And yet somehow, those questions become so familiar that they start to feel like wisdom.

But maybe wisdom isn't doubting yourself forever.

Maybe wisdom is noticing that the doubt has been there longer than the problem.

Maybe the relationship isn't the first thing you've questioned.

Maybe you've questioned your feelings, your needs, your memories, your identity, your instincts, your desires, your right to take up space.

Maybe you've been interrogating yourself for so long that certainty feels dangerous.

Maybe the real question isn't

"Why am I questioning this relationship?"

Maybe it's

"What would my life look like if I stopped putting myself on trial?"

Because people will tell you it's not normal to question whether your relationship is right for you.

But I think it's far stranger to spend a lifetime questioning every signal your heart sends, and still believing the problem is the question.

If you asked me who they were,

I would tell you they spent their life

looking beneath the surface of things.

They were the kind of person

who sat with broken stories

and searched for the wound beneath the wound,

the fear beneath the anger,

the child beneath the adult.

They carried other people's pain carefully,

as though every hurt entrusted to them

was something sacred.

They believed people made sense,

even when they were falling apart.

And perhaps they believed that

because they spent so much time

trying to make sense of themselves.

They were a collector of questions.

Questions about love.

Questions about belonging.

Questions about why some people

spend their whole lives

trying to earn the affection

they should have been given freely.

There was a father-shaped ache inside them.

Not just grief for the man who was,

but grief for the man who might have been.

They understood that love and anger

can share the same home,

that you can miss someone

and mourn what they took from you

at the exact same time.

As a child,

they dreamed everyone else was an alien

and they were the only human left.

Years later,

I think they were still trying to answer

the question hidden inside that dream:

Where do I belong?

Yet despite that loneliness,

they spent their life

helping others feel less alone.

Children.

Teenagers.

Adults carrying invisible scars.

They offered people something

they themselves had long searched for:

To be understood.

They loved stories.

Imagined themselves in magical worlds.

Witches and half-elves and heroes.

Not because they wanted to escape reality,

but because they never stopped imagining

what else a person could become.

They loved their dogs fiercely.

Their blankets found their way onto beds,

their names into conversations,

their wellbeing into daily worries.

Love, for them,

was often practical.

It looked like asking questions.

Checking details.

Remembering things.

Showing up.

They carried grief.

They carried hope.

They carried a thousand unfinished thoughts

about who they were

and who they might still become.

They were trying.

Trying to heal.

Trying to grow.

Trying to build a life

that felt honest.

Trying to make peace

with every version of themselves.

And if this poem

was all that remained,

I think the simplest truth would be this:

Here lived a person

who wanted others to feel seen,

because they knew exactly

what it felt like

to disappear in plain sight.

M.D

Growing up yearning for your father to change teaches you a dangerous kind of patience. The kind that waits too long, forgives too much, and mistakes crumbs for care. You learn to shrink your needs because needing things only ever led to disappointment. You learn to celebrate almosts, maybes, and moments of tenderness that never lasted long enough to feel safe.

And somehow, without choosing it, you carry that training into every corner of your life.

You accept apologies without change. Effort without consistency. Love that asks you to understand everyone else's wounds while abandoning your own. Because somewhere deep inside, you were taught that your role was to endure, to hope harder, to be easier to love.

Growing up yearning for your father to change can lead you down pathways of accepting less than you deserve from everyone, because you were trained for survival in a world where your needs were negotiable.

The hardest lesson is realising that being accustomed to unmet needs does not make you low maintenance. It does not mean you need less. It only means you learned how to live hungry.

And hunger can look a lot like loyalty until you begin asking yourself what it might feel like to be loved without having to earn, chase, minimise, or wait for it.

I remember as a kid

having this dream on repeat.

The whole world was aliens

everyone.

My family.

My friends.

The people at school.

The stranger at the shops.

All speaking a language

I could almost understand

but never quite.

And me?

I was the only human left.

The only one walking around

pretending I knew the rules

pretending I knew why everyone else

made connection look so effortless.

In the dream, nobody chased me.

Nobody pointed and yelled different.

It was quieter than that.

They just… knew each other.

They moved in sync,

laughed at the right moments,

understood things that were never explained.

And I remember this feeling

bigger than fear.

Recognition.

Because even in my dreams

I didn’t fit in.

Even asleep

my brain built worlds

where belonging was something

everyone else received naturally

like breathing,

like instinct,

like being handed a map

I never got.

I used to think the nightmare

was that everyone was aliens.

But maybe the nightmare

was being the only one

trying so hard to learn

how to be something

that came naturally to everybody else.

Looking around thinking,

What is it that you all know that I somehow missed?

And maybe that says something, doesn’t it?

That a child’s imagination

didn’t dream of monsters,

or falling,

or being chased through dark hallways.

No.

My recurring nightmare

was social exile dressed up as science fiction.

The terror wasn’t invasion.

It was disconnection.

It was sitting inside a world full of people

and feeling like I’d been printed

from a different blueprint entirely.

The strange part is

I still carry that dream sometimes.

In crowded rooms.

In conversations.

In moments where everyone else

seems to have downloaded instructions

I’m still searching for.

But now I wonder…

Maybe I was never the only human

in a world of aliens.

Is it just me?

Maybe there were others too,

standing quietly in the crowd,

looking around thinking,

Maybe we were never alone.

Just scattered.

Just fluent in hiding.

I didn’t leave the first time or the second,

not even the sixth when escape pressed in my mind.

I thought I was the problem,

my needs too heavy, my wanting too much

so I shrank.

A person already small folded herself smaller still.

Each time I pictured leaving I saw the beauty first: the way he loves me, the way I love him, the promise of two people asking each other to change into someone they are not.

Everyone praised him in the beginning,

his gifts, his tenderness, how good we looked together.

But they did not see the fights, the tears, the quiet ways we missed each other’s needs.

Leaving doesn’t feel like freedom but failure.

I stayed because walking away from love takes strength, and I don’t know if I have it.

Yet staying feels like slow self-erasure.

This is survival dressed as hope,

wanting to change what should not be changed.

I am grieving the person I wanted to be for him.

I am grieving the family I built and am losing.

I want not to feel this way.

I want to know how to stop.

But for now I stand inside the ache, holding both the love and the ending at once.

TW; Implied abuse of a child

I think the hardest part about loving my father

is hating what he did to us at the same time.

Holding grief in one hand,

anger in the other,

and finding there is no clean way

to put either of them down.

The hardest part of knowing his past,

knowing the shape of his trauma,

is walking the thin line

between who he was

and who he could have been.

Wondering what kind of man

might have existed

if somebody had protected the little boy

before life taught him that love and violence

could live in the same room.

I think if I had met my father as a child,

I would have screamed at my grandparents

to open their eyes.

To see that family friend

was not kindness,

not safety,

but a serpent preying on young children,

poor children,

children desperate to be seen.

I would have begged someone

to stop what was happening

before it turned tenderness into survival,

before survival hardened into rage,

before children became adults

so twisted by pain

they no longer recognised themselves.

Because that is the cruel thing about trauma,

how it can swallow a person whole

until the child disappears beneath the damage,

and everyone left behind

only knows the wreckage.

And the frightening part of being my father’s daughter

is that I am more like him

than I would like to admit.

I carry pieces of him

in my anger,

my intensity,

the way fear can turn quickly into fight.

I hear echoes of him

in parts of myself

I try not to name.

So to hate him

becomes tangled.

Because where does hatred go

when you share blood,

when you share wounds,

when you can trace parts of your own reflection

back to the man who hurt you?

To hate him

can start to feel like hating myself.

And maybe that is the deepest cruelty of all.

That I loved a man

I could not always forgive,

mourn a man

I could not always understand,

and spend my life wondering

whether healing means

learning how to separate myself from him

or learning how to love the parts of me

that look like him

without becoming him.

I used to think

love was supposed to feel like fire alarms.

Like shaking hands and unread messages,

like wanting someone so badly

it carved hunger into my ribs.

I thought intimacy

was the same thing as intensity.

No one ever taught me the difference.

So I learned love

through almosts and chaos.

Through people who kissed like apologies

and left like they were proving something.

Through the kind of connection

that makes your nervous system light up

and call it fate.

Intensity is loud.

It says:

*need me.*

*prove it.*

*panic when I pull away.*

It mistakes uncertainty for depth,

confusion for chemistry,

survival for devotion.

Intensity feels like drowning

and calling it passion

because at least drowning

means you feel something.

And maybe that’s the cruel trick of it.

When you have only ever known intensity,

intimacy does not feel safe at first.

It feels exposed.

Because intensity keeps you busy.

Keeps you performing, chasing, fixing, yearning.

There is always noise to hide inside.

But intimacy?

Intimacy hands you stillness.

And in the stillness,

there you are.

No adrenaline to confuse for connection.

No chaos to outrun yourself with.

Just someone close enough

to notice the trembling parts

you usually keep hidden beneath urgency.

And that kind of closeness

can feel unbearable

when your body learned

that love arrives with tension.

So when someone is gentle,

you wait for the catch.

When someone stays,

you brace for leaving.

When someone offers calm,

your nervous system whispers:

*this cannot be real.*

Because intensity taught me

that love must be earned through suffering.

That if my heart is not racing,

if I am not anxious,

if I am not decoding every word,

then maybe I do not care enough.

But intimacy does not ask me to abandon myself

to keep someone close.

It does not feed on instability.

It does not need to hurt

to feel real.

And maybe that is the grief in it.

Realising how many times

I called dysregulation “love”

because chaos was familiar

and peace felt empty.

I am still learning

that calm is not the absence of depth.

That safety is not boredom.

That tenderness

does not always arrive with fireworks.

Maybe intimacy is not less powerful than intensity.

Maybe it is just quieter.

Steadier.

Less like a lightning strike

and more like learning

your body no longer has to flinch

when someone reaches for you.

Sometimes it arrives quietly,

sits beside you,

and does not make you beg

to be chosen.

When my father got sick,

the world narrowed

to hospital rooms,

to hope held together with shaking hands,

to the desperate belief

that love could bargain with death.

I became someone built from fear.

From fight.

From prayers whispered into the dark

that maybe we could buy more time.

And if we couldn’t—

maybe I could still give him

the things he wanted to see

before he left this world.

His daughter in white.

A grandchild in his arms.

A life that looked safe.

A life that looked right.

I remember the relief in his eyes

when I brought a man home.

The quiet gratitude.

The way he believed

I had finally outgrown

what he thought was only a phase.

But my father and I

were never simple.

Love between us

was tangled with expectation,

with distance,

with all the things

neither of us knew how to say.

So when he died,

everything I had been building toward

collapsed beside him.

None of it felt urgent anymore.

None of it felt real.

Because somewhere along the way

I realised

I had not been living for myself.

It felt like a star folding inward,

slowly, silently,

gravity crushing everything at its centre.

But the supernova came later—

after the funeral.

After the flowers wilted.

After the last thing I could ever do for him

was done.

Even now,

grief feels unreal in my memory.

Like smoke I can almost hold

before it slips through my fingers.

I wanted to remember everything.

Instead, what remains

is the phone call from Mum

and the ambulance driver’s voice

burned permanently into my chest.

And afterwards,

people expected life to continue.

But how do you return to normal

when you no longer recognise yourself?

Every room held reminders.

Every silence sounded like failure.

I felt as though I was surviving only at the surface,

smiling carefully

while underneath

I paddled furiously

just trying not to drown.

I carried guilt like a second skeleton.

Because I wanted him to stay alive

even when I knew he was suffering.

Because I could not bear losing him.

Because I never gave him

the life he wanted to see for me.

No wedding.

No grandchild.

No version of me

that fit neatly inside his hopes.

And honestly,

it felt like I had spent my whole life

failing him somehow.

So I became reckless.

Careless with my body.

Impulsive with my life.

Because danger was easier than grief.

Because numbness was easier than truth.

And the truth was this:

I had been burying myself alive

for years.

Suppressing parts of who I was

until I no longer knew

where performance ended

and I began.

When I finally let myself speak it—

polyamorous,

whole,

real—

it felt like breathing

after years underwater.

Freedom can feel holy

the first time you touch it.

Until you are asked

to abandon it again.

Because the person who stood beside me

through the worst years of my life,

the person who loved me

through grief and ruin and survival,

wanted a future

I no longer recognised as mine.

Everything he wanted

was built around the version of me

I had once promised to become.

The version shaped by fear.

By obligation.

By my father’s dying wishes

echoing louder than my own voice.

But after my father died,

those promises died too.

Not because I stopped loving him.

Not because he wasn’t enough.

But because I could no longer force myself

into a life that no longer fit.

And that was the cruelest part of all.

Because he loved me honestly.

And I knew that if I stayed,

I would slowly destroy us both.

So I let him go.

Not to punish him.

Not because he failed me.

But because I needed to free him

from the person I was trying to become for everyone else.

The other night he told me

he dreamed I said

we were only together

because it was comfortable.

But comfort

does not feel like this.

Comfort does not split you in two.

Does not make you grieve the future

while still loving the person standing in front of you.

Comfort does not ask you

to break your own heart

just so someone else

has the chance to find

a life that truly fits them too.

I always say I’m afraid of heights,

because it’s easier than naming the fears I’ve built brick by brick in my mind.

Heights are simple.

Everyone understands the vertigo, the drop, the way your stomach lurches

when you look down and imagine the end.

But the truth is, I’m afraid of abandonment.

Of being left mid-sentence, mid-love, mid-becoming.

Afraid of the quiet that follows when someone decides

I am no longer something they want to hold.

I’m afraid of silence.

Not the peaceful kind, but the kind that asks questions I don’t know how to answer.

So I fill it.

With chatter, with questions stacked on questions,

with proof that I am interesting enough, warm enough, worth staying for.

I talk because I am trying to be tethered.

Because if I stop, I worry I’ll disappear.

And then there is the fear of falling.

Not from buildings or cliffs, but from people.

From trust.

From moments where I let myself lean,

believing someone will catch me,

only to realise too late that I’ve been bracing myself alone.

So I say I’m afraid of heights.

I let people picture ledges and ladders and open skies.

I don’t tell them that the real fear is the drop inside my chest,

the one that happens when love feels uncertain,

when silence stretches too long,

when I start to wonder if I am already falling

and no one has noticed yet.

Hunger

I was twelve

the first time I learned

that danger doesn’t always look like danger.

Sometimes it looks like kindness,

a soft voice through a screen

asking, just your face,

like that’s all he wanted,

like that’s all he would take.

He was twenty-one.

And underneath it,

even then

there was something else.

A voice I couldn’t quite hear yet,

but I felt it

I am hungry.

I have been hungry.

I was born hungry.

What do I need?

I didn’t have a word for grooming,

only the feeling

of being chosen—

of being pulled closer

by someone who said

I was beautiful

like it meant I belonged to him.

So I gave more.

Because “just your face”

doesn’t stay just your face

when you’re twelve

and someone older

is teaching you

what love is supposed to look like.

He told me to save myself for him.

Planned a future

like my body was already his.

Two girls;

Lacey and Gracie.

Not the names I wanted.

But I was already learning

my wants didn’t matter

as much as being wanted.

And beneath it—

I am hungry.

I have been hungry.

I was born hungry.

What do I need?

And when he was gone,

there was always another.

Older.

Always older.

Different names, same hunger.

Different voices, same script.

Show me.

Prove it.

If you loved me, you would.

And underneath every message,

every request,

every “you’re so beautiful”—

I am hungry.

I have been hungry.

I was born hungry.

What do I need?

Even the ones who called me friend,

the closest male friends,

the ones who sat beside me,

laughed with me,

held pieces of my life in their hands—

even they

eventually wanted

just one thing.

Like kindness

was just patience.

Like friendship

was just waiting

for their turn.

And the ones my age,

the ones who were supposed to be safe—

the two who were real,

in person,

within reach,

they weren’t different.

Just closer.

Just easier

to reach me.

I remember the first time

I lay with a man.

Not a memory,

a fracture.

Pain sharp enough

to split something open

that had never been touched

with care.

Bleeding

that wasn’t supposed to happen.

A body screaming

this is wrong

while my mouth

still said yes.

Because by then

no

didn’t feel like something

I was allowed to have.

And underneath it,

I am hungry.

I have been hungry.

I was born hungry.

What do I need?

I remember choking,

my body pushed past

what it could hold—

lungs burning,

eyes stinging,

everything in me trying to pull away,

and not stopping.

Because hunger

doesn’t stop

just because you’re breaking.

I remember nails

dragging through me,

pain blooming inside

like something tearing

again

and again,

and still,

I am hungry.

I have been hungry.

I was born hungry.

What do I need?

I remember being told off

for not wearing a dress

on a cold day,

because it made access harder.

Because I was inconvenient

when I tried

to cover myself.

Like I was something

meant to be reached.

And afterwards,

something stayed.

Not just memory.

Something in my body

I will carry

for the rest of my life.

Proof

that hunger

doesn’t just take—

it leaves.

So I learned

to leave myself instead.

To disappear

while it was happening.

To go somewhere else

while my body stayed.

Because that was the only way

to get through it.

And now—

now I live

in a body that remembers

everything

before I can even think it.

A body that tightens

at closeness.

That questions hands

before they touch.

Because touch

was never just touch.

It was expectation.

It was taking.

It was something

I had to survive.

And people ask

why don’t you feel safe with men?

why does it never last?

But they don’t hear it,

that voice

threaded through everything,

every memory,

every almost-soft moment—

I am hungry.

I have been hungry.

I was born hungry.

What do I need?

M.D

In another life

I may not mourn what could have been—

may not trace the outline of a self

that never learned to disappear

before it could even begin.

In that life,

my body is not a punchline

or a warning

or a “before” photo

people whisper about like a cautionary tale.

It is just a body—

held,

fed,

unremarkable in its right to exist.

In that life,

kindness does not come with a hook in it.

Hands do not linger with intention,

voices do not soften to sharpen later.

I am not taught that love

is something that takes

and takes

and takes

until there is nothing left

but gratitude for the taking.

In that life,

I am not so good at reading rooms

I forget how to read myself.

I do not study faces like textbooks,

memorise tone like a survival skill,

bend and fold and sand down

every sharp, strange edge

until I am palatable.

In that life,

I am not the joke before it’s told,

not the target that learned to aim itself.

The laughter does not echo

long after the room is empty,

does not root itself

in the softest parts of me

and call itself truth.

In that life,

I am not “too much”

and “not enough”

in the same breath.

I do not grieve

a version of me

that never had to be built

from scraps.

But in this life—

this one—

I am still here.

Still carrying the weight

of every silence

I swallowed to stay safe,

every version of myself

I buried to be loved.

And maybe that’s the quiet, stubborn thing

no one taught me to name:

that even shaped by hands

that were never gentle,

even carved by absence

and cruelty

and hunger—

I did not disappear.

In another life

I may not mourn what could have been.

But in this one,

I am learning

to mourn—

and still remain.

Isn’t it ironic

that the girl who dreams in melancholy

is the one who helps others dream hope,

cupping their fears like fragile glass,

speaking gently so they don’t break.

Isn’t it ironic

that she knows the exact words to say

when someone else is drowning,

yet swallows her own grief

until it learns the shape of her lungs.

Isn’t it ironic

that she becomes a lighthouse in storms

she was never rescued from,

burning herself steady

so others can find their way home.

Isn’t it ironic

that she believes in futures for everyone else,

threads their tomorrows with light,

while her own dreams sit quietly in the dark,

waiting for permission to exist.

Isn’t it ironic

how the ones who carry the most sorrow

learn to be gentle first

as if pain teaches tenderness,