We were small enough
to believe the world began
at the edge of our streets
and ended where the streetlights buzzed on.
Back when summer clung to our skin,
and our only responsibility
was to be home
“before it got dark.”
We were architects of chaos,
professionals in harmless shenanigans,
masters of the late nights,
conspirators in revolutions at Little Africa,
fueled by courage and nerve.
We swore we’d never change.
Swore we’d live near each other forever.
Swore we’d stay exactly as we were,
grass-stained, loud,
half-feral and fearless.
::then we changed::
There were seasons
when we didn’t speak.
Weeks that turned into months.
Silences that felt too heavy
for two kids who once shared
every secret like it was oxygen.
We grew sharp in places.
Proud in places.
Hurt in places
we didn’t yet know how to name.
But even in the silence,
even in the not-speaking,
you were stitched into my story.
A permanent chapter
no distance could edit out.
Because childhood friends
aren’t just people.
They’re witnesses.
To who we were
before the world rearranged us.
Before we learned caution.
Before we learned goodbye.
We’ve been reckless together.
We’ve been silent together.
We’ve been strangers for a while,
and somehow still know
exactly how the other takes their coffee.
Time did what time does.
It stretched us.
Bent us.
Pulled us into separate skies.
But somewhere beneath the years,
beneath the pride and the pauses,
there’s still that old current,
that knowing look,
that familiar laugh,
that shared history humming
just under the surface.
And when we found ourselves
back in the same town,
under that same fading light,
It didn't take long,
::one grin::
::one memory::
::one reckless idea::
And we were right back
in the middle of it,
causing just enough trouble
to feel alive again.
May 2
May 2, 2026 at 12:15 PM UTC
Home was never just a place,
it was the way the air held you,
thick with spices, old wood,
laundry soap clinging to late afternoons,
and something unnamed
that only existed there.
It lived in the corners,
in laughter that didn’t need finishing,
in friends who entered without knocking,
in the quiet understanding
of being known without speaking.
You carried it with you when you left,
folded between shirts,
hidden in the lining of memory,
a scent you’d catch in strangers’ kitchens
that almost—almost—felt right.
Years stretched.
Cities changed their faces around you.
You learned new streets, new silences,
new ways to be alone.
::but home::
Home stayed suspended somewhere behind you,
untouched, unmoving,
exactly as you left it.
::until you returned::
And there it was,
the same creak in the floorboards,
the same light slanting through the window,
the same familiar smell
rising to meet you like an old song.
For a moment,
everything aligned,
past and present collapsing
into a single breath.
But then,
something slipped.
The laughter echoed differently.
The rooms felt smaller,
or maybe you had grown around them.
Friends smiled the same,
but their lives had learned to continue
without you.
Even the scent,
that sacred, impossible scent,
was softer now,
as if time had thinned it
or you had forgotten how to breathe it in.
You walked through it all
like both a stranger and a ghost,
recognizing everything,
belonging nowhere.
Home had waited --
but it had also lived.
And so had you.
And somewhere between
what remained
and what had changed,
you realized --
home is not something you return to.
It’s something you outgrow,
you carry,
you lose,
and search for again and again
in places that will never
quite smell the same.
::home::
Mar 28
Mar 28, 2026 at 1:28 PM UTC
I miss the softness of my soul
like you miss a limb
that still aches
long after it’s gone.
It used to rise to the surface,
warm as breath on glass,
fragile as moth wings
beating against porch light.
I could feel everything.
Too much, maybe,
but I was alive.
Now there is a quiet in me
that does not belong to peace.
It is the quiet of abandoned houses.
Of curtains stiff with dust.
Of a piano no one touches
because the keys remember.
I hardened slowly.
Not in a single storm,
but in small, daily weather.
A word withheld.
A truth twisted.
A door that closed
and closed
and closed.
I learned to cauterize tenderness.
To press flame against feeling
until it stopped bleeding.
Called it growth.
Called it wisdom.
Called it necessary.
But some nights
I feel her knocking
from the inside of my ribs.
Soft hands.
Soft voice.
Asking why I left her there.
The softness of my soul
was not weakness.
It was light.
And I smothered it
to survive the dark.
Now I move through rooms
like something half-formed,
all edge,
all echo.
People say I seem strong.
They do not see
the grave I carry.
I miss crying without shame.
Trusting without strategy.
Reaching without calculating
the cost of the fall.
There is a version of me
buried beneath scar tissue,
still tender,
still luminous,
still believing that love
does not always require armor.
Sometimes I press my hand
against my own chest
just to check,
just to see,
if anything soft
is still breathing in there.
And in the dark,
when no one is watching,
I swear
I can hear it.
::Faint::
::Fragile::
::Not dead::
Just afraid
to come back
into a world
that taught it
how to disappear.
Mar 2
Mar 2, 2026 at 3:53 PM UTC
Sick girl, sick girl,
have another pill, girl.
Swallow the silence
until it’s still.
Moonlight bends
across your skin,
a fragile glow
for the storm within.
Take another test,
open another vein,
the ink runs red
with whispered pain.
They say your numbers
don’t make sense,
as if your body
were the evidence.
They poke, they ****
they watch you fade,
a living ghost
in a sterile parade.
Each answer ends
where another begins,
the cycle spins,
and you’re dizzy within.
Sick girl, sick girl,
the walls know your name.
The beeps and hums
sing your refrain.
You smile for them,
that brave disguise,
while pain paints galaxies
behind your eyes.
You count your scars
like rosary beads,
praying for peace
the body never concedes.
Hope tastes bitter,
faith feels thin,
and healing,
a word that won’t sink in.
They promise someday,
they’ll find the key,
unlock the sickness,
and set you free.
But you’ve learned the truth
beneath the skin,
the war is quiet,
and fought within.
The water hums
beneath your breath,
dark as mercy,
snd close as death.
You dream in ripples,
cold and deep,
where secrets drown
and angels weep.
You smile for them,
but it’s just a mask,
a porcelain face
for a thankless task.
You’ve learned to float
when you should fall,
to say “I’m fine”
when you feel nothing at all.
They promise light,
but you’ve seen its cost,
for every dawn,
something’s lost.
So you stay where shadows
softly spill,
sick girl, sick girl,
have another pill.
And in the dark,
when the night is kind,
you trace the outline
of your mind.
You whisper,
“Maybe I’m not wrong,
maybe I was just
sick for too long.”
Oct 29, 2025
Oct 29, 2025 at 9:10 PM UTC
He drifts through life
like smoke from an old fire,
never rooted,
never gone.
A collector of hearts,
a thief of warmth,
he wears sincerity
like borrowed silk,
shedding it
once the room grows cold.
He speaks in half-truths
that sound like comfort,
touches with hands
that only take.
Every glance, a transaction.
Every promise, a performance.
He doesn’t build,
he drains.
He doesn’t feel,
he studies emotion
until he learns how to fake it.
He knows how to look wounded,
how to tilt his voice
just enough to earn forgiveness
he never intends to deserve.
He plays the victim so well
you almost forget
who’s bleeding because of him.
He feeds on the soft-hearted,
the ones who still believe
in the good inside everyone.
He takes their belief,
their patience,
their shine,
and leaves them questioning
if it was ever real.
He calls it life.
I call it consumption.
A slow feast of souls
served under the illusion of care.
He will never stay long enough
to see the wreckage,
just long enough to take
what was never his to begin with.
And when he’s gone,
you’ll hear the echo of his name
like the tide pulling away,
quiet, inevitable,
leaving nothing behind
but the hollow shape
of where trust once lived.
Oct 23, 2025
Oct 23, 2025 at 5:33 PM UTC
I erased you today.
No, that’s not enough,
I exiled you.
Banished your name,
your shadow,
your smirk that once pretended to be wisdom.
I burned the bridge,
and salted the ashes.
Because some ties
aren’t meant to be mended,
they’re meant to be destroyed
so they can never resurrect.
You called yourself a friend.
You spoke of truth and faith,
while living in contradiction,
wading through filth
and calling it freedom.
You are old enough to know better,
::yet still::
you delight in the ruin of others.
::even now::
Your hands reach for corruption
and your heart beats without remorse.
A mother.
Her daughter.
And you.
Three names that taste
like bile on the tongue.
What you did wasn’t sin,
it was sickness.
A sickness that tries to disguise itself
as charm and confidence.
But beneath it all,
you are hollow.
A man rotting from the inside out,
too far gone for redemption.
I once thought my loyalty was a virtue,
that standing beside you was an act of grace.
But now I see it for what it was,
a wound I kept reopening in the name of friendship.
So today,
I cut the cord.
I cast your memory
into the dark river
and watched it sink
without regret.
No candle for you.
No prayer.
No lingering kindness.
Just distance,
sacred and eternal.
Your voice,
once familiar,
now sounds like a warning.
Your name,
a spell I no longer speak.
I erased you today.
Banished you from thought,
from page,
from the fragile temple of my trust.
You’ll find no sanctuary here,
no echo of your name in my story again.
Some ghosts
don’t deserve haunting
they deserve oblivion.
I erased you today.
Oct 13, 2025
Oct 13, 2025 at 7:46 AM UTC
I have always been the in-between.
Too restless to live in the neat lines of ordinary life,
too structured to dissolve into chaos.
I was the girl who stitched her own clothes,
who wore rebellion like a second skin,
who refused to buy what the world told me to wear.
I moved with the dreamers,
the late-night guitar players,
the ones who screamed their truth into microphones,
and yet -- I also carried myself through offices,
boardrooms, and deadlines,
trying to slip into a language that was never mine.
Neither world held me.
I belonged to both, and yet to neither.
A ghost wandering through borrowed spaces,
a misfit wrapped in leather and lace,
and in pressed shirts and quiet shoes,
too disciplined to be truly reckless,
always too much, and yet never enough.
Call me the contradiction call me the outcast,
but I know what I am.
I am the seam between fire and forst,
the echo in the empty hall,
the haunting proof that not all spirits
fit inside the rooms they enter.
I was meant to create the space in-between --
to live as proof that categories fail us,
that a person can hold rebellion in one hand
and refinement in the other,
and still be whole.
Call me the misfit, the outsider,
the odd one out, but I know better.
I am the bridge.
I am the seam that two worlds try to tear apart.
I am everything that doesn't belong --
and in that truth,
I finally do.
Oct 9, 2025
Oct 9, 2025 at 2:38 PM UTC
The past does not fade,
it waits, silent,
like a shadow clinging to the edges of my skin,
a ghost that never stops whispering.
I open my eyes in the present,
and there it is again,
the same ache,
the same weight,
wearing a different face,
but cutting me with the same sharp edges.
It is not the same, I tell myself,
but my heart cannot be convinced.
This hurt feels heavier,
as though today’s sorrow has reached backward
with cruel fingers,
digging into scars I thought had healed,
peeling them open
until the past and present bleed together.
It becomes a two-headed monster,
yesterday and today fused,
one clawed hand clutching my memories,
the other raking at my chest,
leaving me gasping,
unsure where one wound ends
and the next begins.
My sadness is no longer a passing storm,
it is a tide that never recedes.
It drags me into its undertow,
pulling me farther and farther
from the shore of myself.
I sink into the silence,
my lungs burning,
my body heavy,
my heart weighted with stones
I never chose to carry.
I cannot tell if this is punishment,
or simply the cruelty of time,
to circle me back again and again
to the very place I broke.
Every cycle cuts deeper,
like the clock’s hand is a blade
spinning over my skin,
reopening what never had a chance to close.
There are no words vast enough
to contain this grief.
It is an ocean without horizon,
a cavern without floor.
It echoes through me
until even my bones ache with its sound.
I fall into the silence of it,
a silence too loud,
a silence that devours every attempt to speak.
And still, each morning,
I open my eyes to the same repetition,
a loop I never asked to live inside,
a cruel reminder
that sometimes the deepest pain
is not in the past at all,
but in the way the present
reaches back and ties me
to everything I could not escape.
Oct 8, 2025
Oct 8, 2025 at 8:41 PM UTC
I’m stuck,
but I’m not.
I move.
I breathe.
I write.
Yet nothing truly shifts.
Thousands of thoughts crash
against the throbbing cathedral of my skull,
each one louder than the last,
a storm that never learns to pass.
My head spins in circles.
Words spill out
like inked blood, I can’t stop bleeding.
All I do is write.
I write to keep from vanishing,
I write to remember
that I once had laughter,
once had light behind my eyes.
It’s been months
since my reflection felt familiar,
since my smile wasn’t rehearsed,
since I laughed
and believed it belonged to me.
No one has noticed.
No one asks.
They see me,
but they don’t look.
They don’t see how I lie down
because sitting takes too much strength,
how I slather lotion on my skin
as if to hold myself together,
pretending it’s self-care,
when it’s really survival.
At night,
I whisper to the ceiling’s shadowed beams,
asking if it remembers
what happiness feels like.
It never answers.
It only watches.
Its silence older than prayer,
as I fade into stillness,
a ghost in my own story.
I am invisible.
A presence mistaken for air,
a sigh mistaken for silence.
The signs pass through me,
their lives loud and certain,
while I drown quietly
beneath the noise of my own mind.
And yet …
a part of me still writes.
Still believes
that words might one day
pull me from the wreckage.
That someone, somewhere,
will read my words,
and see me.
Oct 8, 2025
Oct 8, 2025 at 8:21 PM UTC
She spoons the silence like medicine, slow --
into the mouth of a man who once laughed,
once ran through storms and didn't get wet.
Now he lies still,
wrapped in smoke-stained defiance,
eyes dulled by the ritual of decay.
She folds his laundry like prayers,
each shirt a plea.
::Please live::
Each sock a whisper.
::Please see me::
But he hears only the music
of his own undoing,
a symphony of rusted veins and wasted chances.
The doctors left their warnings at the door --
he used them to light another cigarette.
::She watched::
Her hands, once fierce with hope,
trembled like leaves too long in winter.
Love has no instruction
for the hospice of the living.
She's buried pieces of him
in every pill ignored, every meal untouched.
She's the mourner of a man not yet dead --
a ghost tied to flesh by habit and name.
At night, she dreams of locking the fridge,
flushing the liquor,
screaming until the truth pierces the sickness
like sunlight through a boarded window.
But dawn always comes too gentle,
and she, always too afraid
to watch him break all over again.
He smiles sometimes --
crooked, tired, defiant.
"I'm fine, Ma Ma."
::She nods::
Because the lie is warmer
than the cold truth,
She's feeding ghosts
in a house where love
can't keep anyone alive.
But madness is not a scream --
it's a lullaby sung too long,
rocking the cradle of grief
long after the child has grown into ruin.
She talks to the walls now,
asks the dishes why they bother being clean,
asks the mirror if it's seen her son
somewhere inside those eyes.
Her prayers have turned bitter --
not for healing anymore,
but for mercy in forgetting.
For an end to the waiting,
to the twitch of hope
that poisons every breath she takes.
She curses the love
that won't let her walk away,
and the guilt that brands her heels
when she tries.
Sometimes she watches him sleep --
his breath shallow,
his skin pale like old wax --
and wonders if tonight
will be the night.
If God will finally answer
the question she's too ashamed to ask.
She's become the shadow behind the door,
the whisper in the hallway,
the mother of a man who is dying
by choice,
and she,
by watching.
© Dark Water Diaries
Oct 4, 2025
Oct 4, 2025 at 2:18 PM UTC