sunsetdreamsss

I am breaking Ma! atom by atom, mentally, spiritually, catastrophically Yet, I continue, because, Ma, stopping feels like betrayal. Survival has become obligation, not choice. Endurance has become my religion, and devotion my quiet damnation. I crave erasure, the rare privilege of not having to be someone all the time, I want cessation, the absolution of non-being. But I remain here, eroding slowly, because Ma, disappointing you would hurt more than disappearing ever could, because loving you has taught me that even agony must learn discipline.

Tonight, the floor is cold, and the clothes are just debris. I am stripped bare, twenty-three, and wrung out from one week of surviving the people who made me. Thirty days left until graduation. Thirty days left of this small, solitary box where I am allowed to just leak, to sweat out the fever of everything I’ve been forced to swallow. Here, nobody watches me bleed. Here, there is no mother to pick apart my existence, no mother to defend the rest of the world while abandoning me in the crossfire. No father choking me with a panic he calls love. No sibling sitting in total, useless silence, completely untamed by the wreckage. The eldest daughter, they say, like a diagnosis. The one built to carry the architecture of the family, to absorb the shocks, to hold the weight. And it doesn't matter how flawless the performance is, how much of a perfectionist I play to them, I will always be the one who is too much. Too emotional. Too unstable. Too involved. A messy contrast to the youngest, the one with clean hands, held gentle With care!

I lie awake, counting comforts like quiet sins, thinking of privilege of what we call “need” and what we never question. In my bed, I unravel, crying over systems too vast to hold, over hands that hoard while others wander roads searching for a corner of night that won’t swallow them whole. They walk under the same sky, but theirs feels heavier as if darkness chooses where to fall. And I wonder are our problems real, or just louder? Is compassion something we perform, while cruelty slips through in quieter forms? We speak of care, yet measure worth in comfort. We condemn, yet consume the same broken lines. I am tired of these double standards, of the crooked streets I know too well the ones I walk pretending I understand. Still moving, still speaking, still trying not to be shaped by the very things I resist. And somewhere between guilt and silence, I keep asking what does it mean to truly see?

Hurt, healed, cut, cured, and still, I will always be the child of grief.

not very active

They exist in a tongue so foreign to you these songs I hum to keep from hiding. I fear you won’t ever know all of me, won’t see the way the fairy lights turn on simply because you are around. It is a melancholic tune I play. It doesn’t haunt you the same while you are busy saying you hate it all, the life, the living, the sea you find so familiar. But it is not wrong to me. It is my favorite saying, myself in quietude. It feels like fights with my mother, like old films, this selfish need to have you around even when you say you’re done. I won’t ever teach it to you, this feeling that dissolves my heart when the lines of the earth begin to blur. I would stop the earth from spinning for you, hold even the bitterness you carry, if only you’d promise to see yourself adorned with roses. You are an abandoned sea I won’t ever forget, and I am still here, waiting for you to see yourself the way I do.

I have memorized the geometry of shadows cast by a stack of unread giants, waiting for a spine to crack and bleed a gospel I can actually use. But the ink is dry. The paper, just dead wood mottled with the ego of men long buried. Cynicism is an art, and I am its naive expert, practicing the habit of preempting the bruise, sharpening my tongue into a scalpel to peel back my own chest and laugh at the wet, thumping mess of it. “Look,” I tell the dark, “how pathetic to want." "How embarrassing to be made of glass in a room full of stones.” Craving the honest as winter something to strip the skin and leave the bone, because truth is softer than I admit, a suffocating thing. I am a failure of a cynic because I still have the nerve to be haunted. I am a poet only because I don’t know how to bleed without checking the light, to see if the red looks pretty on the floor.

I am not angry. I tell the dirt, I tell the air. I am not angry. But mother, where does a child put this much grief? Where does it go when it has nowhere to stay? I’ll let things feed on me. I’ll let the grief eat until it is full and I am empty. I’ll burn my hands, I’ll char the skin until the nerves go quiet, so you don’t have to hold them. I’ll burn my hands so you never feel the weight of what I carry, so you don’t feel the burden too. I’m not an angry person. If I cannot lay this grief at your feet, I will hide it in the marrow. I’ll make art from my guts, I’ll pull the red strings out and call them ribbons. I’ll make art from my guts, shaping flowers from the parts of me that ache, and my blood will colour it. My blood will colour it until the garden looks kind. I’ll swallow the rocks. I’ll take the stones of every unanswered prayer. I’ll swallow all the hard rocks and learn to speak around the weight in my throat. Where is she meant to set it down? If I cannot set it down, I will carry it until I break. Trust me, I’m not angry. I have no room left for rage; I am full of stones. Trust me, I’m not angry. I’ll lose my soul if it’s the only thing left to give. I’ll lose my soul if it’s my all that you desire. I’m not angry. I’m not angry. Not anymore.

You traded my kindness for a scalpel, Cutting away at the "no" until it bled. You invited yourself into my temple And left rot in the rafters instead. I was the fool who played the martyr, Guarding a cage that you chose to inhabit. You pushed and you pulled and you pressed even harder, Taking my peace like a thief of habit. You want to talk about being lonely? Look at the scorched earth you’ve left in your wake. You aren’t a victim, you’re the hunter only, Counting the pieces of me you could take. Well, look at the ghost you have made of yourself, And look at the wreckage you call a connection. killing the part of me under subjection. You can rot in the silence of everyone leaving. I won't be the one to hold open the door. Keep your excuses, your lies, and your grieving I don't belong to your mess anymore.

The sun is a gold-leafed guillotine, And I have built this palace of glass With bleeding hands and a laugh like a riot. I am shivering, from the Weight Of a sky, finally blue. the heart rub itself against the very Cage that promises to keep it safe I'm jovial and it's my curse Polished the rust into a mirror, Now I am terrified of the reflection. keeping the wounds un-stitched, feeding salt to the gashes Because if I heal, I am Empty. and If the scar turns Amaranthine, At least I have a map of where the ghost walked.