The world didn’t end like I thought it would,
just got quieter—
like the space after a slammed door,
like a name no one says anymore.

I buried you in the parts of me
that don’t see the sun,
but grief still blooms there,
soft and unwelcome.

I thought I'd be ready.
I thought leaving would feel like freedom.
But all I have now is the echo—
and nowhere to run.

I carried you when you had nothing,
gave without question, without limit.
I made excuses for your weight on my shoulders,
called it love, called it patience.

You needed me then.
You don’t need me now.
Not because you grew on your own,
but because someone else is reaping
the lessons I bled to teach you.

You are everything I asked you to be,
just not for me.

the loneliess has teeth
and it bears down on my heart
next my brain
the hum of the refrigerator is heavy
breaking any silence there was before

i don't turn on the lights anymore
i can pretend you're here when it's like this
dark.
alone.

i fear this may be
me at my best—
half-hearted smiles
held together by thread,
words that choke
before they leave.

if this is all
i have to give,
then what good
am i to anyone?

even my shadows
have grown bored
of following me.

love
shouldn’t ignore no
& rewrite your skin
without permission.

i was 14
& still learning
how to say
yes
to myself.

i didn’t know
how to say no
with a body
that wasn’t even
mine yet.

backseat.
backdoor.
back then.

i bled
& said nothing.

but now—
i speak.

i am not
what he did to me.
i am what i chose
after.

here’s what they never tell you:
to be loved,
you are supposed to be perfect.
smile wide.
never stutter.
keep your darkness tucked
behind your teeth.

but what if you show your cracks?
what if your scars scream louder
than your laugh?
what if your mind is a rainstorm
that never stops pouring?

will they run,
call you crazy,
lock the door,
swallow the key?

or —

and here’s the terrifying part —
will someone stay,
hands steady,
and say:
"i see you,
storm and all,
and i choose
to love you still?"

and if they do
how do you stay?
knowing that you are
worse than they can ever know.

I trace the blade like a promise,
carve my pain into skin—
maybe if I break enough,
you’ll remember how to hold me.

Maybe if I bleed,
you’ll come back,
just to see
if there’s anything left to save.

envy is a strange thing
i scrolled through
the life of a boy
i had never known,
watched the love
pour over him
like flowers on a grave,
watched the silence
turn to screams
of “i miss you”
& “why did you leave?”

& i thought,
what would they say
about me?
would their silence
finally break?
would their love
finally bloom?

but then i realized—
he is not here
to feel it,
to hear it,
to carry it.
& i—
i am still here.
& if i am still here,
there is still time
to teach them
how to love me
while i am alive.

—stay, even if the love feels quiet.

Demons in my orbit, they don’t let me breathe,
Every time I try to leave, they follow underneath.
I swear I never meant to let you down,
But the silence in my room is the loudest sound.

Am I all I ever might be? A shadow in the screen,
Static in the signal, lost somewhere between.
I swear I tried, I swear I cared,
But every time I reach, there’s nothing there.

So I sit and watch the planets spin,
A ghost beneath my own skin.

I see you in the space between streetlights,
where the wind tastes like October
and the leaves whisper your name.
I told myself I wouldn’t go back there,
but memory is a cruel, old house—
doors always open, floorboards aching.

You left your sweater in my closet,
a ghost I never learned to bury.
I wear it when the air gets cold,
pretending it still smells like you,
pretending I don’t feel like the house we built
has been condemned.

It’s funny how we used to love the fall,
how we swore we’d never be like them,
the people who left when things got hard,
the people who stopped saying goodnight.
And now, I walk past strangers
wearing your face in their shadows,
and you, somewhere,
are learning how to love without me.

I don’t know what’s scarier—
the ghosts, or the fact
that I let myself become one.

i know this darkness.
it wraps around me
like an old sweater—
worn, frayed,
but familiar.

happiness knocks at my door
like a stranger with bright eyes,
offering sunlight,
offering warmth.

but sunlight burns.
and warmth fades.
and what if i can’t keep it?
what if it leaves
like everything else?

so i stay here,
in the shadows i’ve named home,
where sadness hums
a lullaby i’ve memorized.

because even pain
feels safer
than hope
that might shatter.

i am a pouring pitcher,
filling every cracked cup,
yet my own glass
stays empty.

i wonder if someone
will see me
evaporate—
but they don’t.

still, i pour,
hoping the universe
will fill me back—
it never does.

i read the words
& they make sense—
but only to everyone else.

i sit in silence,
too afraid to ask,
too tired to keep pretending
that i understand.
maybe i’m not supposed to.
maybe i’m not meant to
know all the things
they do.

so i keep quiet,
wondering if i’m
even allowed to stay.

You moved on like love was a door
you could walk through without looking back.
I am still standing in the wreckage,
hands full of everything I gave you,
everything you never gave back.

He gets the version of you I begged for.
He gets the love I built from nothing.
And I get the ghosts—
the doubt, the trust issues,
the aching silence where I used to be whole.

You made me forget myself.
Now I don’t know how to be anything
but broken.

I came on silver wings,
drifting past dying stars,
hoping to find a world soft enough
to call my own.

I saw blue first,
a planet breathing,
wrapped in mist and promise.
I thought, maybe here—
maybe here I could stay.

But then—
the silence of women swallowed whole,
voices drowned in laws not their own.
Skin held as a currency,
love twisted into a crime.
The ones in power, chosen by fear,
speak with empty mouths
and call it truth.

I watched men sharpen their edges
on the backs of women,
their laughter carving scars,
their hands taking without asking.

The food—
not food at all, but ghosts of what once was,
pumped with things that do not belong.
The trees fall,
not from time,
but from greed’s impatient hands.

And I wonder,
do they not see the world turning brittle?
Do they not hear the earth gasping?

I do not understand your wars,
your hunger for more,
the way you cage each other
and call it freedom.

I only feel it—
the ache of something wrong,
an unraveling, a sickness,
a grief I do not have a name for.

I did not come to be a witness
to a planet choosing its own end.
I came looking for home,
but this—
this is not a place to stay.

So I turn away,
silver wings catching starlight,
searching for a world
that remembers how to be kind.

the hunger whispers
like an old friend.
you answer.

later,
kneeling,
throat raw,
you wonder—
is this all
i am?

he spreads me open and carves me from the inside out with his fingers while telling me im pretty
i tell myself he cant see that im crying
its dark in his van anyways
time moved on
but i didnt
yet another boy tells me im pretty with the lights on and tears streaming
i think im just meant to be sad
why else would this compliment feel so hand crafted
like they picked my lowest times to tell me how beautiful my pain looks
why else would i be so pretty when i cry

"you’re my second favorite,"
they said,
and i smiled,
like it didn’t carve
a jagged truth
into my chest.

i am the runner-up,
the consolation prize,
the one you call
when no one else picks up.

there is no space
in this world
for someone like me—
almost enough,
but never.
quite.

they say it doesn’t matter,
but why does it feel
like i’m disappearing?

i am both the flame
and the fuel.

some days,
i watch myself burn—
wild and untamed,
destroying everything i swore
i would protect.

i feel the cracks forming
before they break,
hear the words
before they cut,
see the wreckage
before it falls.

i want to stop.
god,
i want to stop.

but it’s like trying
to hold back a storm
with trembling hands.
the chaos is mine,
but it owns me.

when the fire dies,
i am left with the ash—
and the aching hope
that somehow,
i can rebuild
before i burn again.

i love you like the sun loves the moon—
too far apart
to share the same sky.

you wanted stillness,
a life with roots.
i wanted movement,
a life with wings.

we tried to meet
in the middle,
but love
couldn’t bridge
the distance.

so i let you go,
not because i stopped loving you,
but because staying
meant losing
ourselves.

some love shines forever,
but ours was the kind
that had to end
to set us free.

if i carved my pain
into my skin,
if i starved myself
into nothing,
if i made a graveyard
of my body,
would you believe me then?

tell me,
how much of me
must i destroy
before you see
i'm already gone?

relief
i don’t want to die,
i just want
the ache
to go away,
the heaviness
to lift,
the silence
to be kind.

i don’t want
to end it,
i just want
to feel
like i’m
breathing again.

ocd is
the loop
you can’t break,
a thought that whispers
over and over—
check again,
just to be sure.

you do what it says,
but the relief is temporary,
like a mirage
disappearing
as soon as you reach it.

you try to fight,
but the chains are invisible,
and they drag you
in circles.

i’m standing at the edge,
but it’s not the fall
i’m thinking about.

it’s the emptiness
that calls to me—
soft, persistent,
a shadow whispering
i’m not enough here.

it’s not wanting to die,
just wanting to know
what it would feel like
to be somewhere
without this weight.

maybe i just want to
know what it’s like
to stand there
& not feel
so lost.

i do not believe
in gods or devils,
but guilt whispers
their names to me
anyway.

a hymn of
you should have been better
plays in my chest,
and i hum along,
even though
i do not know the words.

you walked through the fire
& lived to tell the tale—
but now,
the smoke
still clings to your lungs,
& every breath feels
like a battle
you never asked to fight.

how do you measure love
when your heart is a wildfire
& theirs is a candle?

i want a love
that burns my skin
just to prove it’s real,
but they tell me
that warmth
is enough.

maybe i want too much—
a love that spills over,
a love that consumes,
but isn’t that what love is
supposed to feel like?

because if it’s not desperate,
if it’s not all-encompassing,
then how do i know
it’s real?

they call it "too intense,"
but all i hear
is "not enough."

they say,
you can’t have this body
and this sickness.

but they don’t hear
the screaming silence,
don’t see
the empty plates,
don’t feel
the shame that
swallows you whole.

to them,
you are just
too much.
to you,
you are never
enough.

they say,
you can’t have this body
and this sickness.

but they don’t hear
the screaming silence,
don’t see
the empty plates,
don’t feel
the shame that
swallows you whole.

to them,
you are just
too much.
to you,
you are never
enough.

I spent months stitching up silence,
learning the shape of a world without you,
teaching my hands not to reach,
my heart not to hope.

Then suddenly—
your names lit up my screen,
familiar and distant all at once,
pulling me back to a door
I thought was locked for good.

My heart stuttered, tripped on old wounds,
on the words I can’t take back,
on the echoes of my own cruelty
that I fear you still hear.

I’ve whispered sorry a thousand times
into empty rooms,
but no matter how much I kneel before the past,
it won’t rewrite itself.

So why am I smiling?
Why does hope slip through the cracks
like light I wasn’t expecting?
I should be fine without you.
I was learning to be fine.

But here you are—
and I don’t know how to hold this,
don’t know how to let myself have this,
don’t know if I deserve to.

And still, I want to.

she stole a ring
& called it forever.
i said yes
because i wanted
to believe her.

i carried us—
the bills, the food,
the fights.
she carried
nothing
but the matches
she used
to burn me.

she made me leave love
then punished me
for trying to find it again.

& still—
she gets the happy ending.
& i get
the trauma.

but i know now:

love doesn’t
ask you to bleed
& call it
home.