They call it a job,
but it is a slow bleeding
no one charts.
I walk into rooms
where bodies betray themselves,
where machines breathe louder than people,
where families look at me
like I hold something sacred
I was never given.
I learn how to speak in softness
with hands that have held too much,
how to say it’s okay
when it isn’t,
when it never will be.
There is a sound
a monitor makes
when something is slipping away,
and it follows me home
like a ghost I cannot name.
I carry strangers in my chest,
their last words,
their fear,
the weight of their leaving
pressed into places no one can see.
I hold their hands
when the room grows quiet,
when the space between breaths stretches thin,
when they search for something
they cannot say out loud.
Sometimes they hold on tighter,
as if I am the last proof
they are still here.
Sometimes they let go slowly
while I am still holding on.
I wash my hands
but nothing leaves.
Not the faces,
not the way a hand goes still in mine,
not the quiet after
when the room forgets them too quickly.
I am expected to keep moving,
to turn the bed,
to answer the call light,
to become steady again
in seconds.
So I do.
I tuck the grief into my ribs,
smile like something unbroken,
chart like it was just another hour.
But there are nights
I feel it all at once,
every loss, every almost, every ending
rising like a tide in my throat.
And still,
I go back.
Because somewhere
between the breaking
and the unbearable weight of it,
there is a pulse that returns,
a breath that stays,
a life that refuses to leave.
And for a moment,
just a moment,
I am part of something
that chooses to remain.
Mar 24
Mar 24, 2026 at 1:31 AM UTC
Love with you is not loud.
It does not arrive in fireworks
or declarations meant for an audience.
It lives in the quiet,
in the spaces we don’t fill,
in the way our silence understands itself.
You are my husband,
but more than that,
you are the place I did not know I was searching for.
I have always been someone
who needed control,
who held the world tightly
just to feel steady inside it.
And yet with you,
something softens.
I lose my place in you sometimes,
not in a way that frightens me,
but in a way that feels like finally resting.
It is strange,
to find yourself in another person,
to see your edges blur
and not rush to rebuild them.
Your presence does not take from me.
It gathers me,
reflects me,
shows me parts of myself
I never knew how to hold alone.
There is a quiet surrender in loving you,
not loss,
but a gentle unraveling
of the need to always be in control.
And in that surrender,
there is something unexpectedly beautiful,
something warm,
something whole.
I am not disappearing in you.
I am being met.
In your stillness, I expand.
In your closeness, I breathe.
And in the silence we share,
I am no longer afraid
to be consumed
by something that feels like home.
Mar 24
Mar 24, 2026 at 1:26 AM UTC
I can breathe,
they tell me that first,
lungs rising, falling,
numbers steady,
oxygen obedient in my blood.
So why
does it feel like I am suffocating
inside a body
that won’t let me out?
My muscles whisper no
when I ask them for anything,
eyes blur,
limbs fade,
voice weakens like a dying echo.
And somewhere in the quiet panic
is the truth I cannot escape:
without the steroids,
my chest could forget how to rise at all.
So I take them.
I take the breath
and swallow the chaos with it.
And then the storm begins.
Lights are too loud.
Sounds are too sharp.
Crowds press against my skin
like I am being peeled open from the inside.
Time moves too fast,
faster than I can keep up,
faster than I can mother,
faster than I can be me.
I am holding a toddler
while unraveling quietly,
smiling, responding, existing,
while something feral and frantic
paces inside my ribs.
I clean.
I fix.
I perfect.
I chase control in straight lines and folded edges,
as if order could stitch me back together.
But it doesn’t.
Because this body,
this swollen, restless, foreign shell,
is not the one I remember.
Not the one that felt like home.
I look at myself
and feel like a visitor
trapped behind my own eyes.
And when the overwhelm crests,
when the noise and the pressure and the too much
spill over,
my body flares.
Again.
And the answer is always the same,
more medication,
more infusions,
more cycles of saving
and unraveling
and saving again.
A loop with no clean edges.
A breath that costs everything.
I can breathe.
Yes.
My lungs obey.
My vitals behave.
But my mind is drowning
in a body that feels like it’s closing in,
tight, loud, relentless.
So tell me,
if air is filling my chest,
why does it still feel
like I am suffocating?
Mar 24
Mar 24, 2026 at 1:09 AM UTC