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Mother, I remember your boots at the door,
shined and waiting before sunrise.
You wore your uniform like a second skin
and marched away
while I was still small enough
to need carrying.

I bet you’d stay this time.
I bet the war in you
would not be louder than me.
But you always chose the field,
the orders,
over the quiet weight of my arms.
I hate you for leaving,
and I hate myself
for hoping you’d return.

Father sits across from me now,
hands rough, stained with regret.
His voice trembles like a fragile candle:
“I’m trying. I’ll do better.”

I want to believe him.
God, I want to believe.
But hope is heavy,
a stone I carry in my chest,
and I’ve learned how easily it sinks.

Still, I place my wager carefully,
sliding another piece of myself
across the table,
unsure if this time
the game will let me win.

I bet on losing dogs.
And they all wear my family’s faces.
23:47pm / It’s been a while
Everly Rush Sep 9
At the roots,
the weight is unbearable.
It sits in my chest,
cold and heavy,
pressing down like I’m made of stone.
Some mornings I can’t breathe.
Some mornings I wonder
if I’d be easier to forget
if I just stayed still,
if I just let it win.

But I climb anyway.

My hands scrape the bark,
splinters biting like the thoughts
that scream I’m not enough.
The climb is slow and exhausting.
Every step feels like carrying
a storm inside my chest.
Part of me wants to fall back down,
to sink into the roots
and disappear,
but another part,
the part that refuses,
keeps reaching.

Halfway up,
the darkness still follows me.
It wraps around my arms,
my legs,
pulls at my hair,
whispers that the weight will never leave.
And yet, through the leaves,
light spills in,
blue and sharp,
like air I almost forgot existed.
And for a moment,
the heaviness loosens just enough
for me to keep going.

Higher still,
the branches cradle me.
The bend like I bend
under every night I can’t sleep,
every morning I can’t face.
I am tired. So tired.
But still, I climb,
because the alternative
is lying still in darkness
and letting it swallow me whole.

At the crown,
the air is thin, trembling, alive.
The shadows below stretch long,
but they cannot reach me here.
For a moment,
I breathe without the stone.
For a moment,
my chest feels empty in a way
that isn’t suffocating,
that is free.

I stretch my hands into the light,
and it burns, and it sings,
and it reminds me of
that freedom exists,
messy, fleeting, and terrifying,
but real.

And though I know
the roots will call me back,
and the stone will wait there again,
I also know this:
I am strong enough to climb,
to rise,
to reach the treetops again and again.
Even with the shadows,
I can still stand in the light.
22:55pm / I think I’m doing better but at the same time, not.
Everly Rush Aug 24
The dormitory never sleeps.
Lights hum like insects,
shadows twitch across the floor,
and every night I remember,
this is not where I am visiting.
This is where I live.
This is where I am kept.

The other girls go home.
They vanish into weekends,
into kitchens filled with noises
and smell
and warmth.
They complain about parents,
about rules,
about being seen too much.

I would give anything
to be seen too much.
Instead, I return to my bed,
my small metal drawer of belongings,
my ceiling with its web of cracks.
It stares down at me every night,
silent,
unchanging,
a reminder that nothing waits
beyond these walls.

My parents are smoke now.
They pass through my thoughts like strangers.
Their voices are static,
distant,
sometimes I wonder
if they’ve already forgotten me.
Maybe I was too easy to let go.
Maybe I was never worth holding onto.

I don’t plan for the future.
The future is a locked door.  
The future is another hallway
that leads back here.
I have stopped imagining anything else.

Sometimes, in the quietest hours,
a thought flickers,
a cruel kind of hope:
one day I’ll grow wings.
But even as it comes,
I know it isn’t true.
Even birds fall.
Even birds are crushed beneath tires
on roads no one bothers to cross.

So I fold myself smaller each night,
make myself a shadow
so no one will notice how much I’m missing.
I practice the art of disappearing,
learning to dissolve into silence,
to be overlooked,
to vanish without the world
ever pausing to ask why.

And if I write it down,
it isn’t for saving.
It’s proof I was here,
that once there was a girl in this building
who waited,
and waited,
and was never collected.
Found this in my drafts. I wrote this on the 21st April at like 4ish in the afternoon.
Everly Rush Aug 16
Grass too green,
sunlight ripped into jagged shards
by the fig tree’s fists of shadow.
Cupcakes bleeding frosting,
iced coffee sweating through paper cups.
We pretended it was a family.
We pretended.

Mum sat besides Dad,
like their bones remembered being joined.
Like his hands weren’t already holding someone else’s.
Like her vows weren’t chained to her job.

I opened my mouth.
The sugar rotted on my tongue.
Everything spoiled.
And I told them.

How I hunted for older hands.
How I thought I needed it.
How I wanted out when I saw the second man,
but the door was already locked.
How they used me.
How one carved into me,
split me open with steel,
left a word to rot inside my skin.

My own scars, I’ve loved.
They are mine,
my handwriting on my body.
But this one,
this one crawls.
It doesn’t heal,
it festers,
a maggot under the flesh,
hissing that I didn’t choose it.
A vandal’s tag on my skin.
An infection of me.

Dad’s face twisted, anger,
then collapse.
Mum’s face, vanished,
then drowned in tears.
The helpers, two statues,
faces carved like gravestones,
motionless as I gutted myself.

I clutched my ribs,
hugged myself,
but the scar pulsed,
thick, swollen,
as if it was laughing.
And no one reached for me.

The picnic died.
Flies feasted on icing,
ants drowned in coffee.
Mum and Dad pulled apart,
the rug split like torn flesh.
And me,
already in pieces,
my body a crime scene.

I dragged myself to the sun,
limped like the scar was a chain.
Collapsed.
Let the world blur.
Even in sleep,
I felt it twitch,
like a parasite feeding.  

When I woke,
a hand on my face.
Gentle. Slow.
Tracing me the way she once did
when I was a baby,
her fingers mapping me
like I was new to her again.

She avoided the carved word.
Her touch lingered on the scars I made myself,
as if she understood those belonged to me.
Her fingertips circled,
again and again,
like she was trying to write over the wound,
to overwrite the trespass,
to give me back the body I lost.

Mum beside me,
breathing clouds.
No words.
Just her arms,
finally closing around me.

And for one fragile moment,
the scar went still.
Not gone.
Never gone.
But almost forgotten.
22: 22pm / Make a wish! I know it only counts for 11:11 but 22:22 counts as well
Everly Rush Aug 11
no seriously what’s the point
like they hand me this plastic bottle
full of “fix me”
and im supposed to believe
these tiny sugar dots are gonna save my life
like yay science thank you doctor man
you’ve officially cured my brain
…. except no
because i still wake up and the first thought is ugh
and i still go to bed and the last thought is ugh
and all the middle thoughts are worse

i swallow them anyway
every morning like a good little patient
smiling like yeah totally “getting better”
but it’s just
chalk and spit
and everyone keeps saying “just give it time”
like time isn’t the exact thing
that’s been killing me slowly this whole time

and it’s funny
because when i really needed them to work
when i was one inch away from not being here at all
they just sat in my stomach
doing absolutely nothing
lazy little magic beans
refusing to sprout
and i guess im still here
but not because of them
never because of them

maybe they’re just placebos
maybe everyone knows it but me
maybe they’re hoping ill stop talking about it
because my silence is easier to swallow
than the truth that
im still
not
okay
20:05pm / i don’t think meds are working
Everly Rush Jul 29
I fell like silence breaking,
a scream that never made it out,
the wind folding around me
like arms that never did.

Now, I wake in a room
stitched with wires and cold light,
where the air tastes of bleach
and every surface hums with life
that isn’t mine.

The machine speak in beeps
soft, exact, unfeeling.
Beep.
I’m still here.
Beep.
I failed.
Beep.
I failed.

They say the sound is good.
They say the beeping means I’m stable.
But it only reminds me
that death didn’t want me.
That earth opened its arms
and still let me go.

The noise wraps around my head
like a shroud of neon thread.
It winds through the hollow
in my chest,
settling where the fall had emptied me.

I hate its voice,
its small, insistent hope.
It has no right to be so calm
when everything inside me
is still falling.

I close my eyes,
but there’s no peace.
Just the beep,
beep,
beep,
dragging me back
from the edge I chose.

And I want to ask the silence
why it let me go.
Why it handed me back
to this world of white and wires,
to these strangers with clipped voices
and pity in their eyes.

But silence won’t speak here.
Only the machines do.

Beep.
I’m still alive.
Beep.
I’m still alive.
Beep.
God, why?
14:22pm / I just want absolute quiet and chocolate and to sleep forever.
Everly Rush Jul 27
Now I’m here.
Still breathing, somehow.
Skin full of bandages.
Bones that don’t work right.
Machines that beep
like they’re disappointed I made it back.

They say I’m lucky.
That I survived.
That it wasn’t my time.

But if it wasn’t,
why does it still feel like
I left the real me on the concrete?

Dad didn’t come.
She did,
but only to sign papers
and shake her head.
Her words still burn:
”Guess you’re not even good at this.”

I thought it would feel like a clean slate.
Like waking up would mean
something changed.
But it didn’t.
I’m still the same hollow girl,
just stitched back together,
like that’s enough.

They gave me a new journal
with blank pages
and hopeful prompts.
But I don’t want hope.
I want to know
why being alive
still hurts more than falling ever did.

I don’t know if I’ll write again.
Maybe this is it.
Maybe this is the only thing
I had left to say.

I jumped.
And I survived.
But that doesn’t mean
I’m okay.
10:47am / I have a horrible pounding headache
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