Let me surrender
not to you, not to love,
but to the small, cracked animal I’ve buried inside.
I am incapable
stone-lunged, frost-hearted,
the rooms of me echo like unlit attics.
Your voice
thin wire through winter air
the only sound that shakes the dust,
makes the dead moths flutter
against the glass of my ribs.
Still
I stay rock.
I stay ruin.
I stay
unmoved,
except,when you speak.

Her dreams didn’t die all at once.
They faded like a body losing warmth
quietly, while the water boiled
and someone called her name
from the other room.

She tells you to chase yours
because she didn’t.
Because she stayed
with a man, with a family,
with the version of herself
that always came second.

She was just like you.
Sharp in the mind,
soft in the places
no one thought to protect.
She gave too much
because no one taught her
she was allowed to keep anything.

That’s why she says,
“Never compromise.”
Not because she’s brave,
but because she remembers
how it felt to hand over pieces of herself
and be thanked for it.

You remind her
of the girl she buried
under laundry and prayer.
You speak too loudly sometimes,
and she doesn’t stop you.
You leave rooms without apologizing,
and she watches
half grief, half awe.

You are
her unfinished sentence.
The better ending
she never wrote.

And still,
she’s praying
not for herself anymore,
but that this world
won’t ask you to shrink
just to fit inside it.

Don’t give up.
Because if you do,
then all she gave up
will have been for nothing

I swallowed myself whole
a jagged glass in the throat of night,
shards carving the shape of someone else.

There was a girl who wept like winter rivers,
whose heart cracked open, spilling cold and unkind,
drowned in the hunger of being too much and never enough.

I pressed my face to the mirror’s cruelty,
tried to recognize a stranger’s eyes,
watched her bleed quiet into the cracks,
her silence louder than any scream.

I shed the soft skin of innocence
it peeled away like dead leaves in autumn,
revealing a skeleton forged in fire and regret.

I carry the ghosts of every version lost,
each one a scar, a wound, a prayer
and sometimes, when the night is sharp enough,
I hear their voices,
fractured lullabies in the dark,
telling me I am not broken
only becoming.

I do not wear the brightest colors
they blister on me like false hallelujahs,
like hymns sung by mouths that never tasted ash.
Red is a lie. Yellow screams.
I was meant for grey
for the shade that lives between smoke and surrender.

I hate the sun
its gold teeth, its cruel spotlight.
It peels me open like fruit left out too long.
Give me the sky when it's weeping,
when it folds in on itself like grief
tucked beneath an old coat.

Sweet coffee tastes like apology.
I drink it black
like a widow’s veil,
like ink spilled on a suicide note.
I want the bitterness to bite,
to remind me that even silence can scald.

Joy is foreign
a costume that fits someone else’s ghost.
When I laugh, it echoes wrong,
as if joy is borrowing my voice
and not returning it.
I was stitched from thunderclouds,
from cellar air and moth wings.

I do not like people.
Their voices swarm like flies
around the fruit I’ve already thrown out.
Their love is too loud, too pink.
I crave solitude the sharp knife of it,
clean, precise, and without perfume.

I used to love like a storm
no map,
no shelter,
just sky and surrender.
The kind of love that
undoes your name
and doesn’t ask
if it can.

He was ruin,
and I walked in like
a pilgrim.

Now
I trace lives in pencil.
Measure joy in teaspoons.
Ask if the floor can hold
this kind of weight.
Love, this time,
comes with a blueprint.
I carry a calculator
in my chest.

It’s not that I don’t feel
it’s that I count the cost
before I bleed.

God wants something from me.
I don’t know what.
But it isn’t this.
It isn’t peace.
It isn’t sleep.

He calls it a purpose
I call it a sentence.
And maybe that's blasphemy.
But I’m too tired to care about heaven.

Every day, I wake up
inside a body that never asked to exist.
And I carry a name
that feels like someone else’s mistake.

The world keeps turning,
not out of beauty,
but because no one knows how to stop it.
It wants me to smile,
to adapt,
to bow.
I won’t.

Not out of courage
but because I no longer know how to pretend.

If I had the pen,
God would be a child,
crying in the dark,
begging someone to answer.

And no one would come.

I save people
because no one ever came for me.

Because every time I reach for someone else,
I forget-briefly
that I’m still drowning.

It’s not nobility.
It’s not grace.
It’s the only way I know how to stay alive
without admitting I don’t want to be.

As long as I’m helping someone else
pull their pain out of their chest,
I don’t have to look
at the blade still in mine.

But the worst part is this:
One day, I won’t be able to save them.
And when that day comes,
I won’t know how to save myself either.

And I don’t think anyone else will,
or would.