#thejournal

The city is waking up. The sun slowly rises into the sky. People are walking to work, while others are finally making their way home after a night shift.

If you sit on a bench and simply take the time to observe, you notice everything. Some people look sad, while others seem to be in an incredibly good mood. Some are listening to music through wired headphones, the old kind, and somehow they've become so vintage that they're actually cool again.

I found myself watching the way people walk. The city workers cleaning up after yesterday's little storm. The excitement on young children's faces as they hurried off to their nannies. The way people dress, the way they move, whether they're alone or walking beside someone they love.

Without even realizing it, I started imagining their lives. Where they were going. What they were thinking. Whether they were rushing toward something they loved or trying to escape something they didn't.

For a little while, I was just an observer, quietly collecting tiny pieces of strangers' stories.

And then, this morning, I became one of them.

Waiting for the vet clinic to open so I could leave my dog there. Walking back out twenty minutes later, tears streaming down my face, my heart breaking, while somewhere nearby, someone was probably watching me the same way I had been watching everyone else.

Within a vast dry land covered in smog, stood a mysterious cloaked individual staring at the distance. Despite his face hidden by the ominous shadow, his sharp ticking gaze shot out a figurative light that pierced through the scope of a shivering sniper—a poor soldier who launched himself off the ground and ran for his dear life.

"Death!" The sniper called him. "Death is near!"

With flailing hands he scurried off to the hills. "Death! Death!" He cried. "I don't want to die!"

"What a big fat lie." The cloaked man frowned. He then slid his right hind leg to his back, and stretched his left hand to his right. With a boom and a swoosh, he flew a kilometer at the speed of sound.

The sniper froze in his tracks. Cold breath crawled up his neck. A deep otherworldly voice then whispered, "You signed a contract, correct?"

"No, no, no!" The sniper pleaded. "I had no other choice!" Tears rolled down his wounded cheeks.

"What?" The cloaked man scoffed. "You blame it on fate once again?" He then shook his head. "I pity your lack of wisdom."

Suddenly, he faced the sniper, whose pants appeared soiled. As thick smoke, he floated around him like an apparition. With deep disappointment in his voice, he lectured the sniper. "I gave you plenty of time," he said, "time to ponder about your life."

"To visualize the choices and the consequences Demoirai has laid out for you," he added. "It was all clear and obvious.

"But you WASTED EVERY SECOND OF IT." He growled.

"Your lover, Nichol. You left him alone to fight for the very people who hurt him."

A countdown echoes in the now frozen landscape.

Tock. Silence, darkness, and thick air surrounded the soldier.

It was difficult to breathe, to speak.

Heartbeat, and the thundering roars of the cloaked man were all that remained.

"He trusted you. Did you know that?"

"I can see the regret in your pathetic face."

"But it's too late to turn back now."

"Your deadline has arrived."

Tick. The sniper dropped to the ground. His face slammed on to the cracked clay.

A bullet hit his heart, blood dripped from his dusty chest.

There on the hill he died alone, none to claim his body. But one to mourn was the man he called death, who felt nothing but melancholy.

Soon, the cloaked man disappeared, leaving not a trace.

Though he'll come back without delay.

As many timelines will pass his way.

This was a tale of a man named K█uin.

To believe it or not, is a choice you'll determine.

I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’m meant to be loved the way I need to be. Maybe no one really tries to unwrap the fire long enough to find the velvet buried underneath.

From the outside, I think I look like something to be careful with, too intense, too sharp, too much. I think I scare people. And somehow, I scare men, because I probably look like something they think they can’t handle. Something that might burn if you get too close.

Maybe people are drawn to that at first, curious about the heat… but they hesitate. They stop at the surface. They don’t stay long enough to understand that the fire isn’t all there is.

Because underneath the sparks and the rusted armor, there’s something much quieter. Softer. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to fight, doesn’t want to hold everything together all the time. A part that’s tired of being the one who anticipates, who manages, who protects.

I learned to stay composed. Especially at work. To keep my voice steady, my face unreadable, my reactions measured. To absorb, to deflect, to move on. But sometimes, I don’t hold.

The truth is, I am a little girl in plain sight, even if no one seems to notice. And what she wants is simple, almost disarmingly so: to feel protected. Not controlled. Guided. Seen. Acknowledged. Understood.

Not in a way that takes anything away from me, I know how to take care of myself. I’ve learned how to stand on my own, how to carry things, how to endure. But there’s a difference between being capable and never being allowed to rest.

What I long for is the feeling of being held in someone else’s certainty. Of knowing that, for once, I don’t have to be the strong one. That I can soften without consequences. That I can let go without something falling apart. To be someone’s whole world, even just for a moment. To be the one they choose to protect, not because I need saving, but because they want to keep me safe. I don’t want to have to ask. I want to be able to let go, and stay warm under someone’s wing.

It’s funny how I find myself hesitating every time I speak to someone new. My brain immediately slips into protection mode, a silent alarm ringing in a room only I can hear.

I’ve become like a stray cat on the street. You lean in, thinking you’re offering kindness, your hand soft and open, but she looks at you with sharp, heavy distrust, her body coiled, ready to slice you open if she has to. Not because she’s mean, but because she learned.

And that’s the thing. It’s not that I am mean. It’s that I am, unfortunately, experienced. I know that a hand held out is often just a prelude to a hand pulled away.

So I don’t open easily. And in the worst case, I simply stop talking. Not because the words have run dry, or because the conversation has lost its spark, but because silence is the only place where I’m certain I won’t be misunderstood. I retreat before I can be pushed out.

It happened again, not long ago.

At first, I was reluctant. The door stayed bolted, the lock double-checked. But the conversations were good, dangerously good. The kind that hum at the same frequency as you, the kind that make the weight of life feel temporarily lighter, almost negotiable.

So I allowed something rare. I softened. I uncoiled, just a little. I offered a fragment of that carefully guarded, slowly rebuilt trust.

And then, just like that… gone.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was dense. It settled in the room like something unspoken, something final.

Back then, I had a very clear image of myself. It felt like taking a bullet.

You drop. No elegance, no warning. Impact. The kind that knocks the air out of your lungs before you even understand what happened. For a moment, you stay there, stunned, pressed against the ground, listening to the echo of it.

Then you move. Not gracefully. Not heroically. You crawl. You drag yourself forward, inch by inch, through the dust of something that is already over.

And somehow… you get back up. Still shaken. Still marked. But upright.

And the strangest part is this. You don’t stop. You don’t swear it all off. You don’t turn your back on the road. You steady yourself, lift your head, and you keep going.

Not because you believe. But because you haven’t learned how not to.

And maybe that’s the real fracture. Not the absence, but what it confirms. That instinct, that quiet voice, was there from the beginning. That it recognized something before I allowed myself to see it.

Still, I didn’t betray it. I moved carefully. I held back. I let things unfold without surrendering entirely. I stayed somewhere in between, between distance and desire, between caution and curiosity. And maybe that space is where things like this are doomed to exist. Brief. Intense. Unsustainable.

It stings, but not loudly. Not dramatically. It settles deeper than that. Something familiar. Something almost expected. Again.

Still, I won’t call it a mistake. I didn’t give everything. I didn’t lose control. I let something exist, briefly, exactly as it was.

And whatever it was… it was real.

Maybe they left because they couldn’t carry it. Maybe it asked for a kind of presence they didn’t have. Maybe it simply became too much once it stopped being light. It doesn’t matter. Their absence doesn’t rewrite what was there. It only reveals its limit.

And yes… a part of me is still there, on the side of the road, watching the dust settle, aware of the silence that follows something unfinished.

But the rest of me has already moved.

09.04 - Turns out writing a book is slowly destroying me. (If you were wondering what it’s like.)

Everyone likes to say you are resilient when you move on quickly from a situation that was considered “hard.” When you get back on your feet, the world stands back and applauds your recovery. They see the "after" picture and call it a victory.

But nobody tells you what the cost of being resilient actually is: it costs a part of your heart. Every fucking freaking time.

We treat resilience like it’s a muscle that grows, but it feels more like a quiet amputation. You cry for five minutes, a timed release, a brief vent of the pressure, and then you get back on your feet. You look in the mirror and whisper to yourself that you are a "trooper," that it wasn’t meant to be, and that you couldn’t control it, so you have to move on.

This isn’t a choice; it’s a negotiation with survival. To move on, you have to accept a situation you never wanted to happen. You perform a kind of emotional triage, deciding which parts of your soul are "non-essential" so the rest of you can keep walking.

When someone asks how you feel, you’re proud. You smile and say, “It is what it is, I can’t change it, so I better keep walking.” You wear your strength like a badge, and the world believes the polish on the surface.

But what they didn’t see is the piece of your heart that you left on the side of the road.

That tiny piece of muscle you left behind? You will never get it back. It’s the piece that knew how to trust without checking for weapons first. It’s the piece that was soft enough to feel the warmth before it learned to fear the cold.

Every time you "keep walking," that loss pushes you to harden a little more. Resilience isn't a bounce; it’s the formation of scar tissue. And while scar tissue is tough, it’s thick, it’s durable, it’s hard to break, it also doesn't have any nerve endings. It protects you, but it doesn't feel.

There is a specific, hollow grief in being praised for a strength you never wanted to have. It’s the pride of a survivor who realizes they are becoming a version of themselves that is slightly smaller, slightly more airtight, and much more weary.

So today, I am resilient a little more. And I am doing it with the efficiency the world expects of me. But as I walk forward, I know I am lighter in the worst way.

I let a piece of me stay behind on the side of the road. I am standing, I am moving, and I am "strong." Because I'm a fucking warrior.

But I am also exactly one piece of myself less.