sleep seems to have deserted me again. these past weeks, i’ve moved through my own house like a shadow, awake through the night and pacing my room until dawn begins to appear at the windows. even with fresh air coming in, everything feels strangely stifling. i wake choking on panic, my heart stumbling wildly against its cage, every nerve alive with alarm. i feel worn down by it all, my body feels like a battlefield after the soldiers have gone. i look in the mirror and see a girl hollowed out by wakefulness: eyes bruised by sleeplessness, lips drained of colour, hair tangled like she’s been running from something she can never outrun. i have disliked my reflection for years, that is not new. what is new is the ferocity of it. the old dissatisfaction has sharpened into something with teeth. i have spent so long dismantling myself that i scarcely understand why i still hope someone might look at the ruins and call them lovely. this morning i forced myself from bed despite feeling completely depleted, like a body being dragged from a river. every movement felt thick and futile, as though i were pulling my own corpse through molasses. i went downstairs and helped mum in the garden. my hands trembled as i pulled weeds from the warm soil, and it felt as though they returned the moment i turned away. the earth should have grounded me - the scent of wild thyme crushed underfoot, the soft bleating of lambs in the pasture, the cool mud of the creekbank on my bare ankles- but everything feels one degree removed, as though i were watching myself through a pane of misted glass. later i baked bread in the kitchen. flour settled over my cardigan and my cheeks while i kneaded dough until my arms ached. mum moved quietly beside me, and i could feel her tiredness matching my own. for a little while, the rhythm of it comforted me. then i made peach cobbler and the entire house smelled of summer. yet even then my thoughts drifted back to E. and his absence. days have passed now. no reason to stop by. no excuse. what haunts me is that the ending was never abrupt, it simply bled out. it faded into politeness, into distance, into a sort of careful “tolerance.” i felt it long before i could prove it. in the letter i never sent, i told him i would do everything differently. i told him that my self hatred made me become a performance of myself instead of a person. i told him i felt him withdrawing months ago and began sabotaging everything because i could not bear the suspense of waiting to be abandoned. he insisted that he loved me more than ever, yet i increasingly felt the opposite, perhaps that is the simplest way to say it. what i perceived was not affection but tolerance concealed beneath kindness. when he would speak to me, he would remain gentle. sometimes that gentleness feels less like love and more like the care one extends to someone who is already gone, as though i was already a ghost, and he was trying not to frighten me by admitting it
