Niko Sinclair

Mom,

I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to sit down and write this, because you deserve words that match what you’ve given me. Maybe part of me always worried I’d say it wrong, or that I’d make it too heavy, or that if I really opened my mouth and told the truth, I’d crack open something I’ve spent my whole life holding together. But I think I’m finally old enough to understand that loving someone doesn’t mean keeping everything quiet. Sometimes it means saying it out loud, even if your voice shakes.

I remember more than I ever admitted. I remember the way I could read the whole night in the sound of the front door. I remember learning how to breathe shallow when the air felt unsafe. I remember cleaning up messes I didn’t make, and trying to shrink myself down into someone easy, someone who wouldn’t add to the weight you already carried. I remember watching you come home exhausted—so tired it looked like your bones were made of sand—and still finding a way to ask me how my day was. Like my life mattered, like I mattered, even when yours was being pulled apart in a hundred directions.

You were the only steady thing in a house that never stayed steady for long. You were the one who kept the lights on, the meals coming, the bills paid, the world turning. You were the one who did it all while still trying to protect my heart from things you never should’ve had to face alone. And I know you thought I didn’t see it. I know you tried to keep your tears quiet, tried to make your fear invisible. But I saw it anyway. I saw the nights you broke when you thought I was asleep. I heard the arguments. I heard the promises that didn’t mean anything in the morning. And even then, you still got up and kept going.

I need you to know something I’ve never said clearly enough: you didn’t just raise me. You saved me. You gave me a blueprint for what strength actually looks like. Not the loud kind. Not the kind that demands attention. The kind that keeps showing up. The kind that keeps loving. The kind that keeps a child warm and fed and cared for even when the world is cruel and unfair and relentless. When I think about the person I’m trying to become, the version of me that feels safe instead of braced for impact, it’s because of you.

There are parts of me that are still shaped by that house. I can feel it in how I watch people’s moods like weather, how I instinctively look for exits, how I get protective so fast it’s almost automatic. Sometimes I still catch myself trying to be “easy,” trying not to need too much, trying to earn my place by being quiet. I’m working on it. I’m trying to unlearn the idea that love is something you survive instead of something you rest in. And I think that’s the most important thing you gave me—because even in the worst of it, you taught me that love can be real. You were proof.

I also want you to know this: none of what happened was your fault. I know you probably carry guilt you don’t deserve. I know you probably replay moments in your head and wonder if you could’ve done more, or done it differently. But you did more than enough. You did what you could with what you had, and you did it while being exhausted, scared, and alone in ways most people will never understand. You were never the reason things were hard. You were the reason I made it through them.

I don’t say this to reopen old wounds. I say it because I’m not a kid anymore, and I don’t want to keep living like the truth is something we have to tiptoe around. The truth is you were my home. You were the safest place I had. And even now, even with all the scars and the memories and the parts of me that still flinch at sudden noises, you’re still the person I trust most in the world.

Thank you for every meal you made when you barely had energy to stand. Thank you for every time you chose softness when life tried to harden you. Thank you for every time you loved me out loud, even when you were running on empty. Thank you for being my mother in every way that mattered, and for being the kind of person I can look at and say, That’s what strength is.

I love you. I always have. I always will. And I’m going to keep building a future that feels safe—not just for me, but for you too, in whatever ways I can. You deserve peace. You deserve rest. You deserve a life that doesn’t feel like endurance.

You gave me everything.

Reply to Illyriana

01. Titanic

02. A Walk to Remember

03. Dear John

04. The Notebook

05. P.S. I Love You

06. 10 Things I Hate About You

07. Beastly

08. Safe Haven

09. How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days

10. Dirty Dancing

11. Pretty Woman

12. 50 First Dates

13. My Best Friends Wedding

14. 13 Going on 30

15. Sleepless in Seattle

16. Gone with the Wind

17. The Bodyguard

18. 27 Dresses

19. When Harry Met Sally

01. I Knew I Loved You by Savage Garden

02. Making Memories Of Us by Keith Urban

03. Honey Bee by Blake Shelton

04. My Girl by Dylan Scott

05. Emotions by Mariah Carey

06. Bed Chem by Sabrina Carpenter

07. Adore You by Miley Cyrus

08. Teenage Dream by Katy Perry

09. Adore You by Harry Styles

10. Lover by Taylor Swift

11. Mirrors by Justin Timberlake

12. The Only Exception by Paramore

13. Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy by Queen

Niko fell in love the first time in a place that smelled like dust and old paper, where the windows never opened and the lights buzzed like they were thinking too hard. And back then I still believed the world was mostly kind if you were careful with it. Her name was Mara, and she had a laugh that sounded like a match striking—sharp, bright, and gone too fast. We were sixteen and convinced we’d discovered something ancient and rare, as if nobody before us had ever touched hands and felt the world tilt. She taught me how to steal minutes from the day, how to press my forehead to the cool glass and pretend the future was waiting politely outside. I taught her how to write her name in cursive without lifting the pen, one long ribbon of ink that made her grin like she’d just gotten away with something. We traded secrets the way other kids traded gum, quick and sweet and a little sticky.

For a while, it held. We met in the same hallway every morning, always pretending it was a coincidence, always failing at it. She’d tuck notes into my jacket pocket—tiny folded squares that said things like you looked sad in math or meet me by the stairs after lunch, as if she could rearrange my whole day with a sentence. On weekends, we’d sit on the hood of her brother’s car and count airplanes, deciding where each one was going and which one we’d take when we finally escaped. She liked to talk about leaving the way some people talk about prayer, soft and sure, like it would be answered. I liked to talk about staying, but only if she stayed too, only if we could build something that didn’t feel temporary. The first time she kissed me, it was gentle and careful, like she was testing whether the moment would break if she pressed too hard. It didn’t break then, and I thought that meant it never would.

The heartbreak came quietly, which was the cruelest part. It arrived as a slow shift in her attention, like the sun moving across a room until the spot you’re sitting in goes cold. She started answering my notes with shorter notes, then with smiles that didn’t reach all the way to her eyes. I told myself it was stress, exams, family, the invisible pressures adults swear don’t exist until you’re older. One afternoon she met me by the stairs and didn’t touch me, didn’t even lean in like she used to, just stood there with her hands clenched around her backpack straps. She said, “I don’t think I’m built for this,” and the words sounded rehearsed, like she’d practiced them in a mirror until they stopped trembling. I asked what “this” meant, and she looked past me at the hallway like it could offer her an exit.

Afterward, the world didn’t explode the way I’d expected it to. It just kept going, which felt like a personal insult. People still laughed at lunch, teachers still handed out worksheets, the vending machine still ate your money if you didn’t hit the button hard enough. I walked home with the same backpack and the same shoes, but everything inside me felt rearranged, like someone had taken my ribs and shifted them an inch to the left. I tried to be angry, but mostly I was embarrassed by how much I missed her, how my body kept expecting her to be there. The worst moment was finding one of her old notes in my jacket pocket weeks later, a tiny square that said meet me after lunch, and realizing there would never be another meeting. I stood in my room holding that paper like it was a fragile artifact, like it might crumble if I breathed too hard. Then I folded it back up and put it in a book, not because I wanted to cling to the pain, but because I didn’t want to pretend it hadn’t been real.

It took me a long time to understand what that first heartbreak taught me. Not the obvious lesson—don’t trust people or love always leaves—because those are lazy conclusions and they make the world smaller. The real lesson was that love can be true even when it doesn’t last, and that endings don’t erase what came before them. Mara didn’t ruin me; she simply changed the shape of me, the way a river changes a stone over time. I learned how to carry longing without letting it turn into bitterness, though I wasn’t graceful about it at first. I learned that sometimes people leave not because you weren’t enough, but because they’re running from themselves. And I learned that the first person who breaks your heart also gives you a strange gift: proof that you can survive the breaking. Even now, years later, when I pass a building that smells like dust and old paper, I still think of her laugh—bright as a match, gone too fast—and I don’t flinch anymore.

Rae

Travis

Illyriana

Abby

Elowyn