🌙🦊👻 Jules Fox 👻🦊🌙

He called himself important once…like power was something you could borrow by making someone else smaller.

But he was never anything more than a bully, a loud emptiness wearing a human shape, confusing control with strength. Because he had none of his own.

I think about him now, not with fear, but with clarity, and something almost like pity that I never thought I’d allow myself.

Because what kind of life must it be to only feel tall when someone else is kneeling? What kind of silence lives behind that noise? What kind of loneliness has to be covered with harm just to feel like it exists?

He mistook fear for respect.

He mistook obedience for love.

He mistook my silence for permission

instead of survival.

But I am not that silence anymore. What he took was never his to keep,

and what he tried to break did not disappear the way he expected it to. It learned. It hardened into something he cannot reach, something that does not flinch at memory, something that does not confuse his shadow for authority anymore.

He is still just a bully. Nothing more than that. And bullies are always smaller when you stop standing in their shrinking world. I carry what remains of me forward, not as something ruined,

but as something returned to itself.

She was still learning the shape of “safe,”

still believing the world meant what it said when it smiled at her in soft voices and open doors. He was a lesson she never asked to learn and a presence that called itself harmless, a shadow that learned how to look like light.

The creep didn’t arrive like a storm.

He arrived like something ordinary

enough to trust twice.

And after, the world didn’t shatter all at once,it cracked in quiet places.

in laughter that didn’t feel clean anymore,

in mirrors that stopped knowing her name,

in the way her body learned fear

before it learned how to explain it.

Anger came later. Not gentle, not polite, but alive. It rose like wildfire through her ribs,

like something refusing to stay buried. It said…”this was not yours to take”

It said…”I am still here.”

And slowly, painfully, she began to return to herself in pieces that didn’t ask permission.She learned that healing is not soft. It is teeth. It is refusal. It is breath reclaimed after too long being held hostage by memory.

The creep becomes smaller in the telling,

reduced to what he always was, not a force, not a destiny, not a darkness with power,

but a mistake of proximity that she will never again mistake for safety.

And she grows anyway. Not untouched. Not unchanged.

But no longer his echo. She learns her voice is not something that can be taken,

only something that can be shaken,and still rise.And in that rising, there is something like vengeance that does not need his name anymore.

Only hers…

finally spoken without fear

for the first time in a long time.

We started as Iron in the same river. Forged side by side in the current of childhood.

No distance between us worth naming, no silence that ever felt like absence.

You were the hand I didn’t have to question, The voice that answered before I spoke.

We built a language out of shared glances,

out of scraped knees and late-night escapes,

out of the belief that brothers are what remain

when everything else proves temporary.

We sat in car rides like they were promises

windows down, laughing into motion,

as if the world ahead was always ours to survive.

We learned roads together.

windows down, chasing something we couldn’t name

but always swore we’d find it.

Every ride felt endless then…

Something in you changed lanes without warning,

a quiet drift I mistook for tired hands,

a glance away I forgave too easily.

Still, I called you brother.

Still, I believed you.

We used to say we’d never crash.

But something in you began to drift,

subtle at first,

a hesitation in your eyes at green lights,

a tightening grip when I wasn’t looking.

Still, I trusted you with the wheel.

And then the road ended in impact.

Metal folding into itself like a scream too fast to hear.

Glass blooming outward in a frozen storm.

There was no warning that mattered enough,

no cry that could outrun it, just the sudden betrayal of motion becoming impact,

metal remembering it was never meant to be gentle.

Everything we were

splintered forward at once. Glass like frozen rain. Silence like a verdict.

In that violent stillness, I saw it…

not accident, not fate, not mercy,

but choice.

Now I replay it in pieces I can’t stitch back.

the road we shared,

the trust we built like something sacred,

the final turn where you didn’t just lose control,you used it.

Et tu, brute?

The thought didn’t come gently.

It came like the crash itself, sudden, absolute,

a sentence I couldn’t unhear once spoken by reality.

Even now, it echoes louder than sirens…

you were not just in the car with me,

you were the turn I never saw coming.

Brother,

there are betrayals that break bones,

and there are betrayals that rewrite blood.

And yours did both.

With him, love is not a battlefield or a dream half-faded,

But something lived in ordinary hours.

Laundry folded with care, laughter in the kitchen,

Hands finding each other without needing to search.

I once dreamed of being loved without conditions,

Without having to earn softness or prove I was enough.

And then he arrived,not to change me,

But to stand beside me as if I had always belonged there.

Now I understand what the dream was trying to say.

That love was never meant to be chased or survived

Only met, when the right heart finally comes home

And stays.

You learned me like a language just to steal the way I speak, Wore my laughter like a costume when your own began to leak.

A shadow in my outline, always tracing what I am…A hollow little echo dressed up carefully as “friend.”

You clung to me like ivy, too tight around what made me shine, Not to grow beside me, no you only wanted what was mine. A leech upon my kindness, drawing color from my skin, then calling it your nature once you wore it from within.

You mirrored all my pieces, every fractured, fragile part, But you never learned the meaning stitched beneath a beating heart.

Just a copy of my footsteps, never knowing where they led…A borrowed kind of person with my words inside your head.

And I watched you take and take until there was nothing left to give, still pretending you were living off the life I used to live.

But truth has teeth, and silence breaks, and now I finally see, You weren’t beside me all that time…you were feeding off of me.

So go on, wear my colors, wear the mask you think you’ve earned, But don’t confuse the fire you stole for one you ever burned.

For I am done with empty hands pretending they can care, You were never my reflection, just a leech who lingered there.

You came in quiet, almost small, a harmless-looking thing, A cling to fabric, soft at first, pretending not to sting. But I can see it now, the way you latched without a sound,

A patient kind of hunger buried deep beneath the ground.

You fed on every kindness like it owed you something more, Draining warmth from what I gave until I had none to pour. A tick pressed to my better self, swollen on what I’d share,

Acting like you belonged there, like you’d had the thought to care.

You learned the shape of who I was just well enough to wear, Then crawled inside my outline like you had a right to be there.

But you were never built from love, you only took and took, a parasite pretending you were more than what you look.

And still you copied every part you thought would make you whole, But you can’t stitch a borrowed skin onto an empty soul.

Now I see the truth in you, how easily you hide… A sick little thing that feeds and grows where once was trust has died.

So peel away, fall off me, drop back into the dark you came, No more pretending you were ever anything but the same. Because I was not your host, your home, or your endless supply…I was just the body you latched onto to survive.

I was once your Hellfire and your Holy Water…something you reached for with shaking hands, like salvation you didn’t trust, like ruin you couldn’t resist.

We moved like a story written backwards,love unraveling before it ever learned to hold itself still. Hazy. Afraid. Already leaving while we were still arriving.

“Don’t pay me any mind” I said, as I kept holding you through the unhappy ending, as if love could soften what it was already becoming.

You taught me what it means for tenderness to turn on its own reflection. Each man kills the thing he loves and I wonder if you ever noticed how quietly you were doing it. You ruined me, and I try to wear it beautifully, like something holy I wasn’t meant to survive.

Everything I want to say, I swallow. It sits heavy behind my teeth like a prayer that learned too late it had no listener.

I hate that you loved me for my pain. and I hate that I loved it all the same. I thought the noose you gave me was a necklace. I wore it like proof I was chosen, not realizing I was being tightened into absence.

Now sometimes I feel like a dead thing, still learning the shape of being left. A ghost practicing how to haunt the place where we used to be real

Trauma has followed me like a hungry street dog since I was a child.

A Shelter dog

Your emotional support forever