They say these are the best years, but all I feel is tired.
Waking up too early,
dragging my body through halls and deadlines,
learning things that feel like weights instead of wings.

School drains me.
Not just my energy,
But my spirit.
My time.
My youth.
Gone to schedules and rules, to doing it ‘the right way’ which really just means their way.

Born.
School.
Work.
Die.
Is that it?
Is that really the blueprint I was handed?
Grow up too fast,
make choices too big,
all while being told what to think,
How to act,
What succes looks like.

But what if i don’t want that?
What if I want more than just surviving in someone else’s structure?
I wasn’t born to be a gear in a machine I never chose.

I want to live,
Not just exist.

I don’t need to hear you shout.
Your words reach me just fine.
But when your voice climbs too high.

Something inside me breaks, and the urge to cry crawls its way up my throat.
I want to crawl into a ball,
hide beneath the weight of it all,
cover my eyes,  
trap the tears that scream to spill my eyes.

It’s like my body knows the storm’s coming, even before the first raised word.

And sometimes I raise my voice back.
An accident, a sudden crack in the quiet.
Then regret hits sharp and cold, because it scares me more than any loud word  ever could.

I’m scared.
Not just of the noice, but if what it does to me, how it shatters the fragile calm I try so hard to keep.

You don’t know how much your words and actions broke me,
how they cut deeper than any scar could.

You never cared how I bled inside, only how it fit your story.
After every fight, you act like it never happened,
like to you didn’t rip me apart, like I’m not shaken from your storm.

But I am.
I am broken.

I hate you—
not the childish way, but the way carved from survival, from needing to protect a fragile heart you never learned to hold gently.

When you truly show me love, I don’t know what to do. It feels awkward, strange, like a trap, because your love always came with a cost.
I watch others— friends with mothers who smile without storms, who hug without fear, who speak without swords— and my heart aches, tightens with jealousy.

Why can’t I have that?
It’s not fair.

Every conversation with you
is like walking on glass— one wrong step and everything shatters.
I shrink,
scared of the woman who should have been my safe place.
The scars you left inside me are not healing
And I don’t think they ever will.

It hits deep
in my chest,
in my stomach,
in the spaces between my ribs.
This thing they call nostalgia.

No one told me it would hurt like this.
What do you mean I can’t go back?
How can time be so cruel,
Taking pieces of me with every passing year?
I watch old videos and see myself laughing in some forgotten summer,
A place that doesn’t exist anymore.

It’s like watching a ghost.
I was there.
I was her.
But I can’t reach through the screen and pull her back.

I walk through old streets, sit in familiar rooms
But everything feels faded, like the color’s been drained out and no one told me why.

I wish I could go back.
Not forever
just for a day.
To feel sun the way it felt then.
To laugh without knowing what I’d lose.
To be held by time instead of running from it.
But I can’t.
And that truth wraps around my throat every time I remember.

I can’t be a teen forever.
I can’t freeze these years.
I can’t stop what’s coming.
And it hurts.
Because I’m not ready.
Because I don’t want to grow up.
I don’t want to watch these days turn into stories I tell instead of moments I live.

The past hums beneath my skin,
A song I can’t sing out loud.
Only feel.
Only ache for

There’s a weight I carry,
but you wont hear about it.
I don’t know how to say the words, they get stuck somewhere between my throat and my fear.

Every time I think of opening up,
I tell myself,
“you’re overreacting.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“No one can fix it anyway.”

Its mine.
My mess.
Why make it someone else’s?
What could they even do?

Talking about it feels like asking for pity.
Like I’m begging for attention I don’t deserve.

And if I tried,
if I really spoke,
I know I’d cry.
The kind of cry that leaves you raw and ashamed.

And what if they look at me like I’m weak?
Like I’m broken beyond repair?

Most days I tell myself my feelings don’t count.
Others have it worse.
I should just handle it.

And so I don’t speak.
i swallow it whole.
I wear a smile that lies.

But when you need someone when you are falling apart,
I’m the first to listen.
I’ll sit in the dark with you.
I’ll carry what you can’t.

Funny how I can give kindness, but can’t let myself take it.
I don’t know how.
I don’t think I’m allowed.
And deep down, I’m so scared of being a burden that i’d rather bleed in silence.

I don’t even notice when I start.
Fingers find skin like they’re searching for silence.
I pick until it stings, peel away the edge of something that wasn’t whole a moment ago.

It’s not pain I’m chasing.
It’s not anything,
really.

Just something to do with the noise in my head and the quiet in my chest.

Nails tear, skin rips off.

It’s not about thinking.
It’s about remembering what the mind tries to forget.

A habit.
A comfort.
A scar I’m still making with hands that just won’t rest.

I wish I could explain
how it helps,
even when it hurts.
How it feels like doing nothing
and everything
at once.

I say sorry as a period at the end of my sentence.
A filler word when I forget how to exist quietly.

Sorry for talking too much.
Sorry for being weird.
Sorry for needing.
Sorry for being.

I learned early on that peace comes faster when you shrink first.
I apologise for laughing too loud,
for crying at all,
for bumping into someone who bumped into me.

“Don’t apologise so much.” They say.
And I try, but then I say sorry for saying sorry.

It’s not just a word.
Its a reflex.
A shield.
I say sorry so they don’t leave.
So they won’t get louder.
So I can pretend I’m easier to like if I’m always at fault.

But I’m tired of folding in half just to make others whole.
Of whispering “sorry” like a prayer to be forgiven for simply being here.

One day,
I hope to say “I’m not sorry”
And mean it.

But for now,
Sorry.
I’m stil unlearning.

We were at a dinner table
Yes a dinner table
It's crazy
And as I sat there laughing
My heart felt a sharp pain looking around;
Two kids
A mom
A dad
They called eachother babe
They loved eachother

And I know things are so far from perfect there too
But at that moment I wished that would be my life
But then they drove me back home
To my empty house
Where I cried alone

I don't know what I did to deserve this