Hollow Verses

They buried my childhood without a funeral.

The walls learned my name before I ever learned my own, and every shadow carried the shape of something I was too young to survive.

I grew up believing love always arrived wearing someone else's anger.

So I became quiet. Not because I had nothing to say, because every word felt like another reason to disappear.

People call me strong now.

They don't know strength was never the gift.

It was the scar.

The child inside me never stopped knocking. They simply learned no one was coming.

And some nights, when the world is finally still, I can almost hear that small voice asking the question that has echoed through every year since:

Love doesn't end when a heartbeat falls silent.

It simply changes its shape.

It becomes the ache that never quite fades, the memories that find you without warning, the tears hidden behind unexpected smiles, and the quiet hope that somewhere beyond this life, every soul we cherished is waiting—

I stitched my wounds with pieces of night, and wore my scars like a crown. The world kept asking why I’m silent, never asking what broke me down.

My Own Rescue

There are no footsteps coming.

No gentle knock at the door of the house I built from swallowed words and sleepless nights.

People ask if I'm okay the way strangers ask about the weather, hoping for sunshine, not prepared for storms.

So I learned to become my own rescue.

I stitched my heart together with trembling hands, threaded every broken promise through the eye of another morning, and called survival an ordinary thing.

No applause. No witness. Just another sunrise that never knew how close I came to disappearing into the dark.

There are conversations I have only with the silence, because silence never interrupts, never tells me I'll be fine, never grows tired of hearing the truth.

Some nights my mind becomes an ocean that forgets the shore, and I drift for hours, searching for a lighthouse I eventually realize I must become.

It is a cruel education, learning how to comfort yourself when you've forgotten what comfort feels like.

Learning to catch your own tears before they reach the floor. Learning to whisper, "Stay," when every aching part of you wants to leave.

I have become my own shoulder, my own prayer, my own hand reaching into the darkness to pull myself back one breath at a time.

Maybe that isn't the ending I dreamed of.

Maybe I wanted someone else to tell me I mattered, to carry the weight when my knees gave way.

Instead, I became the person I kept waiting for.

Not because I was fearless.

Not because I was whole.

But because no one else arrived, and my soul, quietly and stubbornly, refused to abandon me.

If tomorrow finds me standing, it will not be because life was gentle.

It will be because somewhere beneath the ruins of every lonely night, I found one faithful thing that never walked away,

I heal me. I save me. I bury what broke me. I carry what's left.

No one is coming. No one ever was.

The house remembers footsteps long after everyone has gone.

Dust settles like old apologies across the window sills, and every room holds its breath as if waiting for a voice that will never return.

Night leaks through the cracks, filling empty chairs and half-finished conversations.

Even the clock grows tired, its hands dragging themselves through another hour that means nothing to anyone.

Outside, the trees bend low under the weight of the wind, whispering secrets to the cold earth.

Inside, silence blooms.

It crawls across the walls, sleeps beside me, wears my name like a borrowed coat.

I have forgotten what joy sounded like.

Now I measure my life in echoes, in unread messages, in the distance between memories and the people who made them.

And somewhere beyond this darkness, morning is arriving for someone else,

but not here.

I found myself there again, at the stone altar hidden beneath the roots, where something nameless has been taking pieces of me for years.

The forest was quiet. Even the crows had nothing left to say. So I laid another piece down, a memory, a promise, a fragment of a dream, and waited.

The thing beyond the trees never showed its face. It never had to. The wounds it left were proof enough it had been there.

Still, I listened for footsteps. For a sign. For some small mercy carried on the wind.

But the wind only returned what it found, silence. And somewhere in the dark, branches shifted. Not toward me. Away.

As if even the woods could no longer bear witness. Yet when dawn arrived, I was still kneeling. Hands empty. Heart hollow. Offering the last light I carried to something that had never once offered its own.

The silence you left behind is louder than anything I've ever heard.

You never cared about my mistakes, never judged my scars, never asked me to be anything other than myself.

You were my comfort on the hardest nights, my best friend when I felt completely alone.

You sat beside me through storms you couldn't possibly understand, yet somehow you always knew when I needed you most.

Now I'm here without you trying to learn how to live with a silence that shouldn't exist.

And I carry the weight of remembering what it felt like to be loved that completely… and the emptiness of not feeling it anymore.

I miss you in ways words will never be able to explain. I just know the world feels colder now.

It doesn’t scream. That would be easier. It sits under everything like a second heartbeat I never asked for.

Most days I can function through it. I answer, I move, I exist in rooms like nothing is wrong. But inside, it’s constant.

A pressure I can’t press out. A heaviness with no shape, no single cause to point at that would make it make sense.

It’s not sadness most of the time. It’s worse than that. It’s the feeling that something in me never fully healed correctly and now everything has to work around it.

There are moments it spikes for no reason. A memory I can’t place. A feeling I can’t trace. Just sudden weight, sudden collapse inward, like I’m folding in on myself without moving at all.

And I hate how invisible it is. How I can look completely fine while something inside me is not fine at all. How I can’t show it without sounding like I’m making it up.

There are days that don’t feel like days, just pauses I keep falling through, no beginning I can point to, no ending I can move to.

The light shows up out of obligation, not because it wants to stay, and even it looks tired by the time it reaches me that way.

People speak like I’m still inside things, like I’m part of the same design, but I’m somewhere just outside it, watching life forget my line.

Even time feels half-imagined, like it might stop if I look too long, so I look away from everything and still feel like I’m wrong.

And I don’t know what comes after this, or if “after” is even real, just this quiet, endless in-between that never says what it should feel.

I speak, but my words fall short of reaching, like hands through glass that no one else can see.

They nod, they smile, say all the right things, but something in me stays untranslated, a language without a listener.

I carry whole worlds inside, storms, constellations, quiet oceans, yet somehow they shrink when I try to show them.

It’s not the silence that hurts most, but the almost the nearly being seen, the almost being known.

So I sit with it, this invisible distance, wondering how I can be surrounded and still feel misplaced.

Some messages travel so slowly they arrive as ghosts touching the room softly as if they still belong there.

They speak in voices the walls remember better than I do. They ask to be held with hands that have already buried them.

And when morning comes, there is nothing left but a colder silence and the shape of someone missing.

By the time I understand what was meant, it has already been sorted elsewhere, stamped, misfiled, remained forever delivered.

I scream where no sound reaches, where even echoes forget my name. My voice folds inward like paper burning at the edges, blackening without flame.

I call out in crowded rooms with a mouth that doesn’t move, smiling like a secret that hurts to keep.

Inside, it is loud, not noise, but pressure. Not words, but weather breaking under skin. No one hears the thunder because it never leaves my chest.

The room still feels too big even when I try to fill it with noise. Everything I do echoes back a little late, like it’s coming from somewhere I already left.

Nothing left. Nothing broke. It didn’t stay where I began.

The room remembers in outlines edges of something once warm, now reduced to the shape of absence.

I keep mistaking quiet for return, as if silence ever meant coming back.

There are doors that never opened, but still somehow learned how to close. And I stand, on the wrong side of all of them.