Feels like I'm vanishing, just a glitch in my own feed,
Staring at the screen, wondering why no one's reached—
Yeah, deep down I get it: I built this empty space,
Brick by stupid brick, in my own awkward ways.
Dodged the calls, flaked on plans, always "too tired" or "busy,"
Slipped into my bubble, let the real world get dizzy.
Didn't mean to ghost, didn't mean to drift so far,
Just kept choosing quiet, like it was who we are.
Now the thundering silence hits back, a roar I can't outrun,
This loneliness I grew, one skipped message at a time.
But ***** it, tomorrow I'll mix that batter myself—
Who am I kidding? I'll hit the store, grab one off the shelf,
All my own, filling the hollow I've made, bite by sweet bite,
Light my own **** candle, make a wish that's just right.
Nov 25, 2025
Nov 25, 2025 at 10:25 PM UTC
In the quiet after the school run,
doors clicking shut, kids' voices fading like echoes,
she slips into the bedroom. Husband puttering in the kitchen maybe,
coffee mug clinking against the counter.
She perches at her cluttered vanity. Late thirties staring back,
crow's feet from squinting at homework, laugh lines from silly family nights.
Powders and lipsticks jumbled with half-empty bottles,
earrings tangled like forgotten promises.
But there, off to the side, not buried but waiting:
that small matte wood box, simple as an old habit,
revered in its quiet spot, away from the mess.
She pulls it closer, into the warm glow of the mirror light.
Fingers hesitating before lifting the lid.
Inside: two silver bands, pure and unpretentious,
thin swirls of blue and gold, like veins of memory.
Tucked in the top, that photo. Him, young and goofy,
arm slung around her, both mid-laugh, eyes crinkled with pure joy,
back when life felt endless and unbreakable.
He was her first real love, sparked in those awkward teen years,
through the rough stuff. Broke days, family drama, dreams that bent but didn't break.
They grew tough together, like roots twisting deep into shared soil.
War took him, sudden and unfair, a hole that never quite fills,
an ache that whispers in quiet moments like this.
But before he left, he'd slipped these to her dad:
"Make sure she gets them. Tell her they're us. Our story, the one we were gonna write."
He'd planned the proposal, the forever, the quiet nights dreaming aloud. And with the rings, that note, paper worn soft from rereads:
Find happiness again, without me. Live big, love again,
scribble a new chapter with someone good, someone who sees your light.
Flashes hit her now. Her kids' messy hair at breakfast,
their giggles echoing his once-upon-a-time laugh;
husband's sleepy grin over morning coffee, steady as the home they built.
She's done it, built this life, honored his wish,
yet the heart tugs, a tender pull between then and now.
Tears ***** then spill, hot and messy.
His rings. Still feel like his, cool in her palm, heavy with what-ifs.
Sobs bubble up, chest tight, it's been forever since she let this out,
thought she'd boxed it away for good. But nope, here it comes,
raw as the day she lost him, grief blooming fresh and fierce.
Then a warm hand on her shoulder.
For a split-second, it's him, that old familiar touch, a ghost's whisper.
Mirror shows her husband, smile gentle, eyes saying he gets it,
holds space for her shadows. No jealousy, just quiet support.
He leans in, kisses her hair, rubs her back in slow circles,
then gives her space, stepping away soft as understanding.
She sniffs, wipes her face with the back of her hand,
dabs at the mascara smudges, lets out a shaky laugh through the ache.
A fond smile creeps in. For that boy, that promise,
the love that shaped her, and the messy, beautiful life she's writing now, layered with echoes of what was and what still beats on.
Nov 11, 2025
Nov 11, 2025 at 4:32 PM UTC
In the pale light of morning's hesitant dawn,
Where shadows linger like unspoken fears,
I wake already worn, a shadow of the fight,
My limbs obey, but spirit disappears.
The bed releases me with reluctant sigh,
Yet burdens cling, invisible and tight,
Body intact, but mind adrift and drawn,
Where once-bright fires now flicker faint at night.
This weariness digs deep, beyond the bone,
A silent thief that steals the will to rise,
Not from the rush of days or heavy load,
But from the weight of endless compromise.
It seeps into the cracks of fractured thoughts,
Where dreams dissolve in rivers of despair,
Echoes in a heart that's turned to stone,
Passion retreating down a quiet road, unfair.
The world outside hums on with ceaseless drive,
Demands that pull like tides upon the shore,
The things that count—ambitions, ties that bind—
They call to me, yet slip beyond my grasp once more.
A job that once ignited fervent zeal,
Now feels like chains in monotony's embrace,
Motivation fades like whispers in the wind,
A soul that's weary, caught in time's slow clasp, erased.
I stare at mirrors fogged with doubt's cold breath,
Reflecting eyes that search for what was lost,
The hobbies, joys, that sparked electric life,
Now gather dust, forgotten at great cost.
Conversations drift like leaves in autumn's gale,
With loved ones near, but hearts a world apart,
I reach for that old spark, but it evades,
A tired self murmuring, "One more day to bear, restart."
Afternoons stretch long in gray monotony,
Tasks pile high, yet energy runs low,
The coffee brews, a ritual of false hope,
But clarity remains a distant glow.
Evenings bring no solace, just the ache,
Of scrolling screens that numb the inner void,
Sleep comes uneasy, haunted by the wake,
Of unfulfilled tomorrows, dreams destroyed.
Yet in the quiet depths, where hope cascades,
Like hidden streams beneath a frozen lake,
I sense a whisper from the buried flame,
A promise that this fog will one day break.
For weariness, though cruel, may carve the space,
For renewal's seed to root and slowly grow,
I trust the embers wait, ready to flare,
And light the path where passion's rivers flow.
Nov 9, 2025
Nov 9, 2025 at 4:21 PM UTC
I'm not okay, and I can't lie anymore—
the mask has cracked, the smile worn through,
and here I am, raw on the floor,
bleeding truth I swore I'd never show you.
I'm lost in rooms where no one knows my name,
surrounded by a world that doesn't see—
I've chased love down but it never came,
just left me emptier than I used to be.
I'm terrified of dying with no one there,
of slipping under and nobody noticing I'm gone—
of waking up at forty with nothing but air,
of every single morning still alone.
Failure's got its fingers on my throat,
whispering I'll never be enough—
that I'm just killing time, barely afloat,
waiting for the day I've had enough.
But maybe breaking open is the point—
maybe I needed to hit bottom here,
to feel every nerve, every severed joint,
to know exactly what I fear.
I've spent so long running from the hurt,
hiding in the comfortable and safe—
but easy never made me worth the dirt,
never showed me what I'm made of underneath this face.
This emptiness, this ache, this sleepless dread—
it's not the ending, it's the cost of trying,
of wanting more than the half-life I've led,
of refusing to go gentle into dying.
So let it hurt. Let it rip me apart.
I'll take the knife and cut deeper still—
every scar is proof I had a heart,
every wound is evidence I feel.
If it doesn't hurt, I'm already dead—
if it doesn't break me, nothing changes here.
I'll walk straight into what I've fled,
and burn away everything but what is real.
I'm learning how to hurt and still keep going,
to sit with pain and not run away—
to take my terror and my not-knowing
and make them into something I can say.
This loneliness that's eating me alive?
I'll make it fuel. I'll make it fire.
If this is what it takes to survive,
then I'll become what suffering requires.
So yes, I'm not okay—but watch me burn.
Watch me take this wreckage and rebuild.
Every lesson that I had to learn
by breaking first, by getting killed.
If it doesn't hurt, it isn't growth.
If it doesn't scar me, it's not true.
I'll take the pain—I'll take them both,
and come out someone I never knew.
Nov 9, 2025
Nov 9, 2025 at 1:28 AM UTC
I still see you there, in the peripheral of life—
months or years stretched between each stolen glance,
a face that hasn't changed in my memory
the way I know it must have changed in mirrors.
And I'm self-aware enough to recognize
this ache isn't really about you anymore.
It's about the version of me who knew you,
who stood at a crossroads
and chose the empty road.
We shared so much then—
stages and stories, all those common tongues
of theater and tale, music and meaning.
So many bridges between us,
and I didn't know which one to cross.
You, with your structures and careful chapters.
Me, fighting for a freedom
I never learned to hold.
Two storytellers on diverging paths,
and the greatest tragedy isn't the distance—
it's that we never wrote
the one story that could have mattered.
Ours.
I don't know who you are now.
I'm honest enough to admit
we likely wouldn't work,
that what I've preserved
has more to do with what I lack
than who you ever were.
But here's the wound that won't close:
I believed then—still believe,
in my most desperate hours—
that sharing life with someone,
truly sharing the weight and wonder both,
is the only path to happiness
that means anything at all.
And I am so alone.
I don't share love with my family.
Barely with my friends.
Just this hollow, echoless space
where connection should be,
and the knowledge that I had a chance—
maybe my only chance—
at the kind of love that might have filled it.
I let it pass.
Now I see you in the peripheral,
living a life I'm not part of,
and what breaks me isn't losing you
but the adventures we'll never write,
the story I'll never get to read—
the one where two storytellers
chose the same path
and I wasn't so alone.
It's too late now.
It was probably always going to be too late.
But I return to this anyway—
the ghost of what I didn't choose,
the belief that I answered wrong
on the only question that ever mattered,
and there are no revisions.
Just the peripheral.
Just the years between glances.
Just this.
Nov 8, 2025
Nov 8, 2025 at 10:39 PM UTC
You're the cigarette at 3 AM
I swore I'd quit.
The number I don't delete.
The bottle under the sink.
I've stopped calling you mistake—
That implies I didn't know better.
I did.
I do.
You taste like relief
That costs too much,
But I'm tired of doing the math,
Tired of white-knuckling through want.
So here's what I'll give you:
My silence.
Not forgiveness—I'm not that generous—
But I'll stop declaring war
On something that lives in my chest.
Tonight, if you show up,
I won't pretend I'm stronger
Than this.
I'll just move over.
Make room.
Call it survival.
Call it Tuesday.
Call it whatever doesn't require me
To keep my fists clenched.
Nov 8, 2025
Nov 8, 2025 at 4:24 PM UTC
I am building houses in reverse—
dismantling the nursery before the child,
unhinging doors that were never installed,
pulling nails from phantom walls.
Each blueprint turns to smoke in my hands.
I measure twice, cut nothing,
stand in empty lots where foundations
were poured in a dream I can't stop having.
The neighbors walk their dogs past my vacant plot.
They see flat earth. I see ruins.
There is a museum in my chest
where I curate exhibits no one visits.
Behind glass: the battle scars,
each one labeled in a language
I haven't taught anyone to read.
Some wounds are fossils now—
ancient, compressed into stone,
but still somehow aching when the weather turns.
I lead tours through empty galleries,
explaining significance to no one,
my voice echoing off sterile walls.
The plaques all say: Circa Unknown. Artist: Anonymous.
Medium: Survival. On loan from a private collection.
I am homesick for a place
that exists only on maps I've burned.
The coordinates lead to water now,
and I am so tired of swimming
toward horizons that keep unpainting themselves.
I doggy-paddle through futures that evaporate,
treading water in the conditional tense—
would have, could have, might have been.
Sometimes I float on my back
and mistake the sky for solid ground.
There are wars being waged in my bone marrow.
Battles in my bloodstream no satellite can see.
I am both the front lines and the disputed territory,
the siege and the city under siege.
I plant white flags in my organs
but the fighting never stops—
just moves to a different theater,
a different season, a different
unnamed country inside me.
The news never covers these conflicts.
There are no reporters embedded in my ribcage.
I'm fine, I tell the concerned faces,
and I am—the way a house is fine
when everyone's moved out,
when the lights work but no one
remembers to turn them on.
The furniture is still arranged.
The clocks still tick.
But the air tastes like afterwards,
like the pause between séances,
like a sentence no one finished.
I am present in my absence.
I am the dream of waking up.
I am checked out like a library book
no one's coming back for,
accumulating late fees in a language
I'm too tired to calculate.
The pages of me are dog-eared,
the spine cracked from being opened
to the same chapter over and over:
the one where I almost believed it.
At night, I visit the houses I never built,
walk through rooms that don't exist,
touch walls made of wishes,
and grieve like a ghost
haunting its own absence—
not the person I was,
but the person I was supposed to become,
the one who lived in the future I don't believe in,
the one who knew how to be fine
without the quotation marks around it.
Nov 8, 2025
Nov 8, 2025 at 4:22 PM UTC
I disappeared into books like drowning in reverse—
coming up for air felt like the interruption,
the world outside the pages a place I had to visit
but never wanted to stay.
Four hundred pages between dawn and dusk,
spine cracked so many times it remembered my thumbs,
and I knew every character's breath,
every turn of phrase.
It wasn't enough to consume—I had to create.
Worlds poured out of me onto loose-leaf,
poems that said what I couldn't speak aloud,
stories where I could be anyone, build anything.
This was breathing. This was how I made sense
of everything I couldn't hold inside.
I was eleven when the poems worried them.
Twelve when all that feeling on the page
seemed like something to diagnose.
Instead of notebooks, I got appointments.
Instead of questions about my worlds,
questions about why I retreated into them.
That's when it burrowed in.
The parasite doesn't announce itself.
It sounds like the people who raised you,
sounds like concern, like love,
like they must know better than you do.
And when you're twelve, you believe them.
Maybe this is just fantasy, just escape.
Maybe all this making is just hiding.
They're trying to help—they wouldn't hurt you on purpose.
So maybe the thing humming in your chest,
the thing that felt like truth,
was never real at all.
The parasite wraps itself around that doubt
and whispers: What if they're right?
But you can't stop creating—it's still who you are.
You keep trying. You keep making.
Only now you're waiting for them to say it matters,
and they keep asking why you haven't done something useful instead.
The parasite grows.
It learns their cadence, their timing,
the exact shape of their disappointment.
Years pass. You leave. Miles between you now,
thinking distance will starve it.
But it's already inside.
Now when you share what you've made,
the waiting feels like standing on trial.
Every hour of silence gains weight.
The kind words that do come feel thin,
and the parasite knows how to turn them:
Politeness. Pity. They didn't know what else to say.
Logic knows better—
people are busy, distracted, living their own lives.
But the parasite is older than logic.
It was there first.
It speaks in the voice of the ones who made you doubt
before you were old enough to know
you were allowed to trust yourself.
And they still feed it.
Even now, when you've built a life
they can't reduce to wasted hours—
that slight hesitation, that subtle redirect,
the question that means: when will you be serious?
So you've stopped calling.
Stopped visiting.
Let the distance do what it does.
Because the boy who knew what mattered,
who filled notebooks and didn't question
whether he was enough—
he's still in there somewhere.
Sometimes I find him.
The words come like they used to,
worlds unfolding without effort,
and for an hour, maybe two,
I'm twelve again and the creating is easy as breathing.
Then I read it back.
The words sit strange on the page.
Clumsy. Forced. Wrong.
I used to do this—I know I did—
but now it feels like watching someone else's hands,
like a skill I never learned at all.
Like I'm fooling myself.
Like I've been fooling everyone.
A talentless hack playing pretend.
There it is again.
Every time I reach for him,
the parasite gets there first.
And I can't tell anymore
where their doubt ends
and I begin.
Nov 8, 2025
Nov 8, 2025 at 4:20 PM UTC
In the gray haze of a Tuesday afternoon,
I stand on the sidewalk's edge,
watching the crowd surge like a river—
umbrellas bobbing, footsteps splashing
through puddles that mirror the overcast sky.
The rain comes down in sheets, relentless,
soaking through my coat, my skin,
a metaphor for the endless scroll of emails,
bills stacking like unread letters,
the quiet choke of routine's invisible grip.
They're right there, the others—
laughing in coffee shop windows,
huddled under awnings, sharing nods
and hurried words. Belonging feels
so close, a single step into the flow.
All I need is to move, to cross that line,
join the tumult, let the current carry me
into conversations, connections, warmth.
But my limbs are lead, rooted in place,
heavy with the weight of unspoken fears.
Alone in the downpour, lost in plain sight,
I watch the world blur and pass,
wondering if tomorrow the rain might ease,
or if I'll find the strength to lift a foot.
Nov 8, 2025
Nov 8, 2025 at 4:18 PM UTC
I don't know what to call you—
this arresting of breath, this sudden
stillness in the scroll of days.
Sun-kissed and smiling, you exist
in a warmth I cannot enter,
freckled constellations mapping
a face I'll never touch.
Your eyes shift between grey and blue
like weather I can only watch approach,
never feel against my skin.
That copper hair catches light
the way hope catches in the throat—
beautiful and burning,
just beyond my reach.
In darker hours, I return to this—
the curve of your smile, the tilt
of your head, the way you seem to offer
something I don't have a name for.
Not quite comfort. Not quite promise.
Just the knowledge that somewhere,
beauty like this exists.
But God, I want more than seeing.
I want the sound of you—
laughter rising warm and unguarded,
your voice shaping words I'd memorize
like prayers. I want the weight
of your presence, not this shimmer
of almost-knowing.
Instead, I have this: freckles and sunlight,
eyes that won't meet mine,
a smile offered to someone else's lens.
A picture in my mind that grows
more vivid the longer I look,
more distant the closer I lean,
more necessary the more it aches.
Nov 8, 2025
Nov 8, 2025 at 12:35 PM UTC