that’s it. enough is enough, i told myself. no more begging people to stay. no more bleeding just to prove i was worth the touch. i swore no one would ever get close enough to hurt me again. so i started building. brick by brick. layer by layer. sealing the cracks with whatever i had left.
the walls rose higher than i ever meant them to. at first, they felt like safety. like i had finally found a way to protect myself. but safety has a way of turning into silence, and silence has a way of swallowing you whole. now i can’t get out. i pressed the mortar in so carefully, so desperately, that i built a cage around myself without realizing it.
i used to think love was about saving people. i thought if i stayed long enough, if i loved hard enough, if i proved myself over and over again, the closed-off ones would finally open. i thought i could teach them how to let someone in. so i gave everything. i watered deserts and called it devotion. i set myself on fire and called it warmth. but all it ever left me with was ashes.
and here’s the cruel part. after all that, i turned into them. the very people who broke me. the ones who wouldn’t let me in. the ones who never trusted, never reached back. i used to hate them for the way they pulled away. now i see that i have become them. i am the avoidant now. i am the one with walls no one can climb.
maybe that’s the part that hurts the most. not the loneliness. not even the silence. but the fact that in trying so hard not to be like them, i ended up becoming exactly what i feared.
