“Chart Notes”

When they ask for names,

I have them.

They swarm.

They fly across my mind like paperwork

I've rehearsed handing over conditions I've read about at three in the morning,

words that almost fit—

until they don't.

But they don't hear that part.

They see a girl in her 20s

who had a baby too young,

who speaks too carefully,

who chose today, of all days—

to finally ask for help.

They tell me I'm not unique.

They don't say it cruelly.

That's the problem.

They say it like reassurance.

Like permission to minimize.

Everyone has migraines.

Everyone has mood swings.

Everyone gets overwhelmed.

There are rules.

I have to earn belief.

I have to show up again.

And again.

And again—

with the same story,

the same symptoms,

the same look on my face

that says I swear I'm not lying.

I only come here

during brief clearings—

those manic moments

where I recognize I deserve better,

where survival feels negotiable,

where I still have the energy

to advocate for myself

before it disappears again.

They don't chart that part.

They narrow me.

They condense my days into bullet points.

Sticky notes.

Prescriptions for the loudest symptoms—

the ones that interrupt their schedule.

Migraine.

Mood.

Sleep.

Everything else becomes background noise,

even to me.

After a while,

the list starts to feel fictional.

If no one can hold it all,

maybe it isn't real.

Maybe I'm just bad at being alive.

No doctor sits long enough

to hear what happens every day,

and what happens rarely

but badly—

the faintness,

the paralysis,

jaw clenched so tight my teeth are cracking,

the moments where my body

refuses to cooperate without explanation.

I can describe it perfectly.

I always can.

But if they don't see it,

it doesn't exist.

And if it doesn't exist,

no one can help me.

So I stand at a crossroads

that no one acknowledges:

keep writing about the things

I don't understand and can't fix,

or fight tooth and nail for a diagnosis that might finally make me legible.

Writing is easier.

Writing doesn't require proof.

It doesn't tilt its head at my age

or my motherhood

or the way I learned pain too early.

Writing is just for me.

Because if I keep fighting,

if I keep showing up,

I will have to endure

that look—

the one that follows me

until the very last moment,

until something undeniable appears,

something they can see

with their own eyes.

“Permanence, Please.”

They tell you your twenties are supposed to feel electric.

Like neon.

Like city lights reflected in rainwater.

Like kissing strangers in crowded kitchens and running on iced coffee and ambition and the certainty that your life is about to begin.

No one tells you how often it feels like standing in the cereal aisle dissociating beside discounted granola bars because one day you looked up and realized no invisible hand was coming to tap you on the shoulder and say:

You are here.

This is the purpose.

This is why your heart keeps surviving things.

They don't tell you that sometimes adulthood arrives quietly.

Not with achievement.

Not with revelation.

But with an email asking if you want to renew your car insurance.

And suddenly you are twenty-six years old,

staring at terms and conditions,

wondering if consciousness itself was some cosmic administrative error.

—

Nihiliphobia.

Fear of meaninglessness.

Which sounds dramatic until it is three in the morning and you are lying awake beside someone you once believed would save you, listening to them snore softly into the dark while your brain asks:

What if love is only chemistry misinterpreted by lonely animals?

What if grief is selfishness wearing black clothing?

What if every poem ever written was just a human being screaming into the abyss and decorating the echo?

You think things like this while folding laundry.

While brushing your teeth.

While watching your daughter sleep with one sock half-off her foot,

her eyelashes trembling against her cheeks like she is dreaming of someplace kinder than this world has ever been.

And that is the terrible thing.

Meaninglessness does not arrive looking monstrous.

It arrives during ordinary moments.

Quietly.

Like water climbing the inside of a sinking boat.

—

At twenty-five, everyone around her seemed to be performing certainty with frightening confidence.

One friend posted engagement photos beneath a vineyard sky,

captioned with paragraphs about soulmates and forever.

Three months later she called sobbing from a gas station bathroom because she had found another woman's lipstick in his car.

One friend became obsessed with wellness.

Green powders.

Pilates.

Sunrise journaling.

"Protecting her peace."

But sometimes when they sat together she would suddenly go silent midsentence,

staring out restaurant windows with the expression of someone hearing distant screaming.

Another friend had a corporate job with benefits and matching beige furniture and a boyfriend who looked genetically engineered in a laboratory for financial stability.

He killed himself in February.

No note.

Just absence.

Just a toothbrush left beside the sink and half-finished coffee growing cold on the counter.

And afterward everyone spoke about him in completed sentences.

As though grammar itself could make death feel organized.

—

She fears how easily human beings disappear.

Not only physically.

Emotionally.

Historically.

Entire personalities swallowed by time.

Women once loved so fiercely their names were carved into letters with fountain pens now reduced to unlabeled photographs in antique stores.

Children whose laughter once filled kitchens now existing only as dates beneath cemetery grass.

Whole civilizations buried beneath oceans.

Every argument.

Every kiss.

Every humiliation.

Every masterpiece.

Gone.

She thinks about Pompeii sometimes.

People preserved mid-panic.

Bodies frozen while trying to outrun something impossible.

And she wonders if this is what being alive is:

briefly hardening into shape before becoming dust interesting enough for future strangers to study.

—

There are moments she almost conquers the fear.

Small moments.

Temporary ones.

Once, while driving home at dusk, she saw a flock of birds rise suddenly from telephone wires all at once,

lifting into the orange sky like a torn piece of music.

And something inside her cracked open.

Not happiness exactly.

Something stranger.

A feeling so sharp and beautiful it nearly resembled grief.

Because for one suspended second,

existence itself felt unbearably sacred.

The kind of sacred no religion fully explains.

And then the traffic light turned green.

The car behind her honked.

The moment vanished.

This happens often.

Meaning arrives in flashes too brief to live inside.

Like lightning illuminating a landscape before returning it to darkness.

—

Her mother once told her that adulthood is mostly pretending not to be afraid.

At the time she laughed.

Now she understands this with devastating clarity.

The cashier making polite conversation while calculating overdue bills in her head.

The father cheering at soccer games while his marriage quietly rots behind his ribs.

Doctors prescribing antidepressants with exhausted eyes.

Old women buying birthday cards for dead husbands because routine survives longer than denial.

Everyone carrying invisible catastrophes through fluorescent grocery stores.

Everyone trying to construct meaning from fragments.

A career.

A family.

A god.

A body.

A political movement.

A lover.

A child.

A future.

Tiny lanterns against an infinite dark.

—

Sometimes she envies deeply religious people.

Not because faith seems foolish.

Because it seems restful.

To believe suffering belongs to a larger narrative.

To believe pain is witnessed.

To believe death is a doorway instead of a wall.

But she cannot force belief into herself any more than she can force herself to stop aging.

She has tried.

She has sat in churches listening to sermons that sounded beautiful enough to heal her.

But afterward she still found herself staring at the sky thinking:

What if human beings invented eternity because we could not emotionally survive impermanence?

And then immediately hating herself for the thought.

—

The fear worsens after becoming a mother.

No one warns you that loving someone that much rearranges your relationship with mortality.

Before, death was theoretical.

Now it stalks her imagination with unbearable specificity.

Car accidents.

Fevers.

Drowning.

School shootings.

Randomness.

Especially randomness.

Because meaninglessness is not merely the fear that life has no purpose.

It is the fear that terrible things happen constantly without reason.

That suffering is not distributed morally.

That good people die mid-sentence.

That children get cancer.

That abusers sometimes live long comfortable lives while gentle people break themselves trying to survive.

She thinks:

If existence has meaning,

why does it behave with such indifference?

And yet—

her daughter laughs.

Just laughs.

At bubbles.

At worms after rainstorms.

At pancakes shaped like stars.

As though joy itself is enough reason to continue existing.

Children do this naturally.

They do not interrogate wonder until adults teach them how.

—

At twenty-six she attends more funerals than weddings.

Or maybe the funerals simply linger longer in memory.

She watches people cry into paper tissues under artificial chapel lighting and thinks about how horrifying it is that every human being eventually becomes a story told in past tense.

She loved sunflowers.

He always whistled while cooking.

They were too young.

Too young.

As though death has ever listened to fairness.

—

And still,

despite all this,

life keeps humiliating her with beauty.

Coffee steam in winter windows.

Songs arriving at the exact right moment.

The weight of sleepy limbs curled against her chest.

Friends laughing so hard they cannot breathe.

A stranger holding the door open while she struggles with groceries.

The moon hanging impossibly low over empty roads.

These moments feel meaningless in the grand historical sense.

The universe does not pause to record them.

No monument will survive them.

And yet they feel enormous while happening.

Which creates the central wound of her life:

If something can feel infinite for one moment and vanish completely the next,

was it meaningless—

or was that the meaning?

—

She once asked her grandfather, before he died, whether he was afraid.

He sat quietly for a long time before answering.

Then he said:

"I think people spend their whole lives believing meaning is something they're supposed to find. Like keys under a couch cushion. But maybe meaning is just what we leave inside each other."

At the time she wrote it down because it sounded wise.

Now she carries it around like an unanswered prayer.

Because she still does not know if human connection is profound,

or merely temporary comfort against extinction.

Maybe both.

Maybe that is the tragedy.

Maybe that is also the miracle.

—

At night she sometimes imagines herself from above.

One small apartment glowing among thousands.

One woman standing barefoot in a kitchen at 2 a.m.

One exhausted mind spiraling through impossible questions.

And then above that:

a city.

A country.

An entire planet turning silently through space.

No soundtrack.

No narration.

Just motion.

The terrifying scale of everything.

The terrifying smallness of herself.

But also—

the strange statistical impossibility that she exists at all.

That atoms became consciousness.

That consciousness became memory.

That memory became longing.

That longing became language.

That somewhere in the universe,

matter learned how to ache.

—

Nihiliphobia is not loud.

It does not always look like despair.

Sometimes it looks like overachievement.

Sometimes like doomscrolling at midnight.

Sometimes like needing constant distraction because silence feels too revealing.

Sometimes it looks like staring at your own face in the bathroom mirror,

trying to understand how a person can simultaneously feel so important to themselves and so insignificant to existence.

She has no conclusion for this.

No elegant ending.

No final revelation waiting patiently at the bottom of suffering.

Only this:

Tomorrow morning she will wake up again.

She will answer texts.

Pay bills.

Worry about the future.

Laugh unexpectedly.

Feel lonely in crowded places.

Love people she cannot keep forever.

And occasionally,

in fleeting unbearable moments,

the world will still appear beautiful enough to break her heart.

She does not know whether that beauty means anything.

“This Love Will Be”

Listen —

this love arrives like thunder dressed in satin,

it knocks at the ribcage and asks for shelter.

It says, I keep storms and I keep light.

It says, bring me everything you are and I will teach you how to breathe again.

From the first glance — a small, catastrophic thing —

I learned the language of wanting.

He held a key I didn't know I was missing,

and I, like a hungry animal, recognized the sound of it in my palm.

There is no sacrifice I wouldn't make:

I would trade my map for a single road that leads to him.

I would hand over my excuses, my safe rooms, my polite departures—

and still call it not enough.

This love is holy and criminal at once.

It bruises like truth, like midnight sun,

like stepping barefoot on both glass and rose petals.

Pain arrives as a companion; hope wears the same coat.

Happiness walks in late and sits at the head of the table,

laughing at how ordinary the world used to be.

When I look at him my life flashes —

not like film, more like pages torn from a book on beautiful fire:

dancing half-naked in the kitchen, flour ghosts on our knees,

jumping into his arms like an accusation, like forgiveness.

Making his lunch with hands that remember how to love small things,

celebrating birthdays like festivals where no one forgets to breathe.

Everything is lighter and heavier at once —

How do you make someone else believe in the gravity of it?

How do you sell the way your feet forget the ground?

You don't. You show up. You keep showing up like light at the edge of a dark room.

You make your ordinary days into offerings: coffee at dawn, an embroidered apology, the quiet way you file his name into the small drawers of your life.

You let your scars be maps, not excuses.

There is something holy in the choosing.

To choose him is to sign a covenant with your own fear:

I will not be small. I will not be safe. I will not be neat.

I will burn and bloom in equal measure.

Let the parts of you that terrify you be the very things he learns to hold.

So yes — a little darkness, because love that never knows winter never appreciates spring.

There will be nights where the tongue of doubt curls like smoke across the bedroom,

where promises shiver and break like thin ice.

But there will also be mornings when the world is a quieter thing,

and two cups of coffee stand like tiny altars on the kitchen counter.

We will teach each other how to be weather.

This love is a radical act of faith and stubbornness:

an insistence that the world may fold, but we will not fold with it.

It will not be calm. It will not be tidy.

It will be extraordinary because we choose to make it so — every small, sacrificial day.

Here is the final thing I will say to you, unafraid:

If loving him means losing pieces of myself —

I will learn to rebuild from the ruins.

If loving him means walking through fire —

I will wear the smoke like armor and the ashes like lessons.

Because love, real love, is both a wound and a medicine;

it asks for courage and returns you whole in ways you did not expect.

This love will have beauty. Pain. Hope. Unforgettable joy.

It will teach me how to live — and how to be brave enough to keep living.

Listen — when I speak his name, the room steadies.

When I breathe, the sky understands.

And if you ask me how to tell someone this is true —

I will hand you these small things: my trembling hands, my steady feet, my truth.

Keep them. Wear them.

“No Emergency Here”

She stopped correcting people when they got her wrong.

It saved time.

They said she was strong, and she nodded. Said she was quiet, said she was private, said she had an old soul.

Everyone liked a label that made discomfort sound poetic.

No one likes a label that sounds like damage.

So she let them have their versions.

⸻

She learned early how to make herself smaller than a room.

Not physically — she still took up space like anyone else — but in the way she moved. Careful with doors. Careful with tone. Careful with needs.

She could fold a feeling down to pocket-size in under a second.

It's a skill, really.

The kind you only learn when big feelings cost you something.

By the time she was old enough to leave, the habit had settled into her bones. Even alone, she moved like someone was watching for mistakes.

⸻

When she became a mother, people called her brave.

She didn't feel brave. She felt like a house with a cracked foundation trying to hold up a chandelier. Beautiful from the street. One good shake from collapse.

But she held.

She held through the sleepless nights and the paperwork and the conversations where her voice turned thin and polite even when she was being erased. She held through the way the world looked at her story and decided it already understood it.

She learned how to sit in waiting rooms like she belonged there.

Learned how to ask questions like apologies.

Learned how to leave parts out.

Everyone could see she was tired.

They just didn't know where the tired started.

⸻

There are things she doesn't react to anymore.

Raised voices.

Doors closing too hard.

That particular tone people use when they're about to tell her she's overreacting.

Her body still reacts — shoulders tight, jaw locked, breath gone shallow — but her face stays arranged. Pleasant. Manageable. Easy.

She is very easy to be around, as long as you don't look too closely.

⸻

At night, when the house is quiet in a different way than the one she grew up in, she sits on the edge of her bed a little longer than necessary.

Not crying.

Not thinking anything dramatic.

Just... there.

Like someone waiting for a feeling to pass that never fully leaves.

If you asked what was wrong, she wouldn't have a clean answer. Not because there isn't one — but because the story is too long, and she's tired of watching people's eyes glaze halfway through.

So she says she's fine.

And technically, she is.

She gets up in the morning.

She loves her child.

She answers texts.

She keeps going.

Nothing about her life looks like an emergency.

“What They Named Me”

They met her first through fragments.

Not through the pulse beneath her ribs,

or the way she bit the inside of her cheek

when she was trying not to cry,

or the absurd, bright laugh that escaped her

at the wrong moments

like something alive and disobedient.

No—

they met her through an edited thing.

A version flattened into language easy enough

to carry in one hand.

A girl reduced to a sentence.

A headline.

A cautionary tale.

A rumor spoken confidently enough

that it hardened into architecture.

And once people build a structure around you,

they stop looking for doors.

She learned this slowly.

At first she thought truth had gravity,

that eventually it would pull everyone back toward it.

Surely if she explained carefully enough,

softly enough,

without anger,

without trembling,

without making anyone uncomfortable,

people would pause long enough to notice

the distance between who she was

and who they had decided she must be.

But narratives are hungry things.

Once fed,

they grow teeth.

And people become attached to the version of you

that asks the least of them.

The broken girl.

The unstable one.

The difficult one.

The dramatic one.

The cruel one.

The ungrateful one.

The liar.

The saint.

The whore.

The victim.

The monster.

It almost did not matter which.

Only that the role remain still enough

for everyone else to keep standing comfortably around it.

Because if she changed—

if she became more complicated,

more contradictory,

more human—

then everyone who misunderstood her

would have to confront the possibility

that they had participated in something terrible.

Most people do not enjoy standing trial

inside their own conscience.

So they preserve the old version instead.

Like taxidermy.

Beautiful in its stillness.

Dead in every meaningful way.

And what frightened her most

was not that strangers believed it.

Strangers build myths every day.

What frightened her

was watching the people who once knew her heartbeat

begin speaking to the myth instead.

As if she were no longer in the room.

As if the constructed version of her

had slowly swallowed the living one whole.

She would say,

"That isn't what happened."

And watch their eyes glaze with irritation,

not curiosity.

Because correction is inconvenient.

Because people mourn the death of certainty

more deeply than they mourn the distortion of a person.

There were moments she almost surrendered to it entirely.

It is exhausting,

after all,

to drag your real self behind you

like a body no one else can see.

To keep insisting:

I am still here.

I am still here.

I am still here.

Especially when the world rewards your silence.

Especially when every attempt to defend yourself

is interpreted as proof of guilt.

She began noticing how identity could become

a kind of public property.

How once enough people agree upon a version of you,

your own memories start feeling counterfeit.

You revisit conversations,

searching for hidden violence in your tone.

You dissect your own grief under fluorescent light.

You wonder whether pain remains valid

once it has been mocked enough.

And eventually,

the most dangerous question arrives:

What if they are right?

Not because evidence exists,

but because repetition itself

begins to sound holy.

There are mirrors that do not reflect.

Only accuse.

She lived in those mirrors for years.

In them,

she became less a person

than an outline filled in by other hands.

And yet—

there remained stubborn things

the false version could not fully kill.

Small survivals.

The way music still reached her.

The way she still turned instinctively

toward tenderness.

The way certain mornings carried light

so gentle across the walls

that she remembered,

for one impossible second,

what it felt like to exist

without defense.

There was still a self beneath the performance of survival.

Bruised.

Distorted.

Often hidden.

But breathing.

And perhaps that is the cruelest part of all:

The real version of you does not disappear

simply because others cannot see it.

It stays alive underneath.

Watching.

Witnessing its own erasure.

Feeling every moment

it is spoken over.

Sometimes she imagined all her unlived selves

standing together in a room.

The one who would have been softer

had she not learned fear so young.

The one who trusted easily.

The one who spoke loudly without rehearsing first.

The one who was never turned into a story

for other people's entertainment.

The one untouched by public misunderstanding.

The one who did not have to become

her own witness,

her own lawyer,

her own historian.

They looked at her

without blame.

That hurt the most.

Because she had spent so long apologizing

for surviving the distortion

that she forgot

none of those versions considered her guilty.

Only tired.

Only wounded.

Only human.

And maybe that is the final horror of it—

not merely that people imprison you

inside a version you did not consent to,

but that over time,

you begin participating in the prison yourself.

You decorate the cage.

Learn its dimensions by heart.

Become careful not to move too suddenly

inside it.

Until one day,

freedom itself feels irresponsible.

But cages rot.

Even the invisible ones.

Especially the invisible ones.

And one evening,

without ceremony,

she stopped introducing herself

through defense.

Stopped bleeding explanations

into closed hands.

Stopped begging to be seen correctly

by people committed to misunderstanding her.

Not because it no longer hurt.

But because she finally understood

something devastating:

A person can spend their entire life

trying to outrun a false version of themselves

and still die exhausted beside it.

So instead,

she turned toward the quieter work.

The sacred work.

Becoming real to herself again.

Learning her own shape

outside accusation.

Outside mythology.

Outside the permanent courtroom

of public opinion.

It was not glamorous.

Healing rarely is.

It looked like speaking gently to herself

when shame demanded violence.

It looked like allowing joy

without first earning it through suffering.

It looked like grief.

And rage.

And long silences.

And the terrifying act

of believing her own memory again.

The false version of her still existed,

of course.

Perhaps it always would.

Some stories outlive the people trapped inside them.

But she no longer mistook its survival

for her extinction.

And that changed everything.

Because the world may keep

its simplified ghost.

Let it.

Ghosts cannot feel sunlight.

Ghosts cannot love.

Cannot evolve.

Cannot become.

Ghosts remain frozen

at the exact temperature

of someone else's misunderstanding.

But she—

despite everything—

“Gentler Ruins”

She kept no clock within the room,

for time had long since learned the art

of speaking without hands.

It moved instead through quieter things

the leaning ash of candles,

the silvering at her temples,

the ache that visited at dusk

and sat beside her like an old companion

who no longer asked permission.

Her bedroom knew her better than the world.

The floorboards bent in places

where she had paced through winters.

The curtains, thin as widow's breath,

admitted only a grudging moon.

The bed, too broad for one,

held the impression of a man who once had slept there heavily—

as men sleep where they are unastonished.

He had not struck her.

He had not starved her.

He had not raised his voice enough

for neighbors to remember.

There are gentler ruins than violence.

He loved her in the manner

some men love inherited furniture

with maintenance,

with ownership,

with occasional polishing before guests arrived.

He kissed her forehead

as one might sign a receipt.

He asked what was for supper

with all the warmth of weather.

He touched her body

as if confirming it remained

where he had left it.

And she—

God help the foolish architecture of fear—

she stayed.

She stayed because the house had roots

and loneliness, she thought,

must surely be worse

when witnessed by no one.

She stayed because girls are taught

to call endurance virtue.

Because leaving seemed a louder shame

than slowly disappearing.

She stayed because somewhere in the marrow

of her younger years

there lived a child who knew abandonment

not as theory

but as climate.

So she folded herself smaller each season,

became convenient as dust,

became a woman who apologized

to empty rooms.

Until one morning

he left.

No storm. No shattering.

No theatrical confession.

Only half the hangers gone,

the mug he favored missing,

the stale rectangle on the wall

where his photograph had paled the paint.

A note upon the kitchen table

so brief it seemed embarrassed.

I cannot do this anymore.

As though "this"

were not a life

but an errand.

She laughed when first she read it—

that brittle laugh the body makes

when pain arrives too quickly

to be named.

Then evening found her kneeling

beside the bed they'd shared for years,

searching beneath it for some further page,

some hidden clause,

some sentence kinder than departure.

There was none.

And so the room grew vast.

Silence entered first,

then memory,

then the old and patient cruelty

of comparison.

For in the dark,

where widowed thoughts breed fastest,

another face returned.

Not handsome by the standards

that magazines appoint,

but lit from somewhere human.

A boy once.

A man now, surely.

He had loved her

when she still wore laughter carelessly,

when summer seemed renewable,

when twenty was an age

that mistakes itself for endlessness.

He had walked beside her rivers,

carried books for no reason,

remembered names of songs she liked,

looked at her

as though her speech improved the air.

He had said little of devotion.

Good men often do.

Their love had lived in smaller acts—

the waiting after work,

the bringing of her coffee sweetened wrong,

the hand that hovered at her back

in crowded streets.

And she, vain apprentice of indifference,

had made a sport of certainty.

She answered tenderness with delay.

Called him clingy when he cared.

Called him dramatic when he hurt.

Kept him near enough to warm her ego,

far enough to starve his hope.

When friends inquired,

she shrugged.

"Oh, it is nothing serious."

Nothing.

How language murders.

She spoke the word so often

that even he believed it.

The day he left,

he did not beg.

Resentment, when matured, grows calm.

He only nodded once

as if to some conclusion

long ago reached privately,

and said he wished her joy.

How strange,

that blessing from the wounded

should sound so much like curse.

Years passed.

She married certainty.

He vanished into rumor.

Then recently—

for grief has ways of choosing dates—

she saw him in the market aisle

between detergent and oranges.

Broader now.

Lines beside the eyes.

The noble weathering of men

who have been useful to those they love.

A child clung to each leg.

Another rode the cart.

An infant slept against a woman's chest—

his wife,

whose tired face held the peace

earned only by being cherished.

He laughed at something one child said,

and the laugh was whole.

She stood invisible among canned soups,

holding pears she did not need,

and understood at last

the scale of what she'd squandered.

Not merely him.

But mornings.

Shared winters.

Inside jokes repeated into age.

Arguments softened by returning.

A thousand ordinary mercies

that become, when absent,

heavenly.

He saw her then.

Politeness crossed his features first,

then caution,

then a kindness so mature

it humiliated her.

They spoke of weather.

People always do

when drowning publicly.

His wife smiled.

The children argued over cereal.

The baby dreamed.

He wished her well.

Again that phrase.

Again the blade disguised as grace.

Now nights are longest near the mirror.

There she sits in candlelight,

studying the archaeology of her face.

The mouth that practiced pride too young.

The eyes that chose the wrong horizon.

The silver threading through her hair

like frost through abandoned gardens.

Sometimes she speaks aloud to glass,

for solitude encourages customs

once called madness.

"What would you have become,"

she asks the younger self reflected there,

"had you been brave enough for softness?"

The mirror, skilled in cruelty,

answers only with resemblance.

At times she thinks she hears

her husband's key,

though he has not returned.

At times she hears children laughing

where no children live.

At times she turns, convinced a man stands near

with river-water on his coat

and patience in his hands.

No one.

Only the wardrobe.

Only the chair.

Only the moon performing autopsies

upon the floor.

Her neighbors say she's quiet now.

That she was always nice enough.

That loneliness has made her strange.

They do not know the true disease.

It is not being left.

It is not aging.

It is not the empty half of bed.

It is the mind condemned

to walk forever through the museum

of unlived lives.

To pass each locked exhibit:

Here the child you never held.

Here the porch where evenings might have cooled.

Here the hand you mocked until it waved goodbye.

Here the self who knew how to receive love

and was abandoned first by you.

Tonight the rain attends her window.

The candle gutters low.

She lifts the mirror from its hook

and lays it face-down on the dresser

like a dead thing.

Then in the dark

she whispers to no witness,

I was loved once.

And after some long while,

I knew it.

And after longer still,