I built the bridge from bones I bent, spines turned into archways so others could cross the floods I once drowned in.
They walked with dry feet, never looked down, never noticed the marrow leaking into the current below, never heard the creak of my joints straining under the weight of their forgetting.
I peeled my days open like pomegranates, offered the red seeds of my time, sweet, bitter, sticky with devotion.
They took them wordlessly, left the rinds in my lap, and wondered why I had no hands left to build more.
My voice grew gardens in mouths that only knew how to scream, I taught them gentleness with a tongue made of splinters so theirs would stop weeping.
When they laughed, I smiled too - even though it sounded like the snapping of the last thread in me.
I unbuttoned the sky for them, let in the stars they said were too far, too cold, I burned myself into constellations, hung hope like lanterns from the constellations of my scars.
They called them decorative, said nothing as I flickered.
When they cried, I brought rain in cupped hands, when they screamed, I carved out a silence big enough to hold them, when they broke, I scattered my own pieces so they could walk barefoot and never cut themselves.
They bled anyway, blamed the stones I never threw.
I held the sun between my ribs, kept it warm for them when winter forgot how to leave.
They sat in the light, never once wondered what it cost me to keep burning when no one ever brought wood.
Every act of love was a small funeral for the parts of me that never returned, I built a cathedral of my exhaustion, hung windchimes made of my teeth so they could hear something beautiful when the storm passed through.
They asked why the melody was so sad.
Still, I opened.
Still, I stayed.
Still, I listened until my ears filled with silence, until their echoes replaced my own name.
Still, I fed the fire, though I had long since run out of kindling and had only my hands left to burn.
I have been altar, offering, and flame, I have been shelter and storm at once, I have been the soft place to fall for those who never learned how to catch.
Now I wonder - if I become earth, quiet, vast, unreachable - will they finally kneel?
Not to praise, but just to ask if it hurt to love this hard, and never be loved back with the same hands.

It's always me - the one to bow, to bleed, to bend, though every bond is built by two, it's me who breaks it in the end.
I speak, but truth turns into lies, my reasons rot into excuses, they scoff at tears behind my eyes - my silence, now their sharpest noose.
Two hands built this fragile thread, but when it tears, they point at mine, the weight of blame, a crown of lead, while they sit high, I toe the line.
I've held their hurt within my chest, let every word carve out a scar, their pain became my own unrest, till I forgot just who we are.
Each time they shout, each time they scold, the past claws out from hidden graves - old wounds awake, the nights grow cold, and I become the one who caves.
My heart - a page too often burned, grows colder with rewrite done, each echo of "it's you who turned" strips warmth away from who I was.
I tried to fight, to speak, to stay, but choking tears stole all my voice, so now I sip, I fade away - as if this ruin was my choice.
I cradle blame like it's my child, hold it close, too scared to part, I learned to say, with voice beguiled; "it's me - I tore this world apart".
So here I sit, alone, ashamed, a ghost of who I used to be, not just misunderstood - but maimed by always bearing guilt for two.
And still, I break - bit by bit.
No one sees the slow implosion, just one more fault I must admit, just one more storm without an ocean.

Everything is muted, not quiet - just unreachable.
The world presses in like water, thick and slow, but I don't resist, there is no fight left, no care.
I wake up, though I don't remember sleeping, my eyes open because they always do, I get out of bed because not doing so feels like too much of a decision.
Everything is weight, even the air feels like it presses against me, heavy, slow, indifferent.
I move through rooms I don't see, touch things I don't feel, my hands do what they've always done - lift, pull, carry, clean - but they don't belong to me.
People speak, their mouths move, their eyes wait, but the words don't reach me, I nod, I pretend, I say just enough to keep the mask from slipping.
Inside, there's no voice to answer them, only the hum of a silence that never ends, I'm underwater, not drowning - that would suggest struggle, there is no struggle left, no panic, no urgency, only stillness.
No one can see it, the surface looks intact, they see functioning, they see survival, but inside, I am a thousand miles from shore, floating in nothing, suspended between thoughts that never quite form.
I forget things constantly, not out of carelessness - out of emptiness, out of disconnection, everything drifts by like seaweed in a current, unnoticed, untouched, unimportant.
I eat, but the taste doesn't land.
I sleep, but I wake up tired.
I speak, but the words feel borrowed, like I'm quoting someone I used to be.
There are no sharp edges, no loud colors, no highs, no lows, just the flatline rhythm of existence with no pulse behind it.
People ask how I'm doing, I say "fine", because the truth isn't even painful anymore - it's just too far away.
There is this numbness that is even deeper than pain, not the absence of feeling, but the burial of it, everything still exists beneath me, I think - but I have no strength left to dive for it.
I want to care, I remember what it felt like to be awake in my own skin, to want something, to be pulled by desire, moved by grief or cracked open by joy.
But now, I just float, eyes open, hands busy, mind elsewhere, if I cry, it's not from sadness.
I am still here, but not really.
I am underwater, and I don't know if I'm waiting to drown or hoping the surface remembers me.

There is a silence that doesn't come from peace - but from being unheard for so long that even your own voice forgets what it once sounded like, you speak, but the words feel foreign, as if borrowed from someone who deserved to be listened to.
You laugh at the right times, nod in conversations, send the right messages, post the right things, and yet - none of it reaches anyone, you could scream and it would echo only inward, rattling through a hollow you that no one else can see.
There are people who say they love you, and maybe they mean it, in the only way they know how - but it's not the kind that finds you in the middle of the night when your chest feels too tight to breathe, and your mind replays every moment you ever got in the way, every time you thought you were too much, or not enough.
And sometimes, you don't even want help, you just want someone to notice that you're not okay without having to explain it again, and again, and again.
You've learned how to make space for everyone's pain but your own, you cradle their wounds while ignoring the way your own body shakes from holding it all, no one asks how heavy its gotten, no one wonders why you always say, "don't worry about me".
But you do worry, you worry all the time, you worry that you're too broken to be loved in a lasting way, you worry that one wrong moment, one slow reply, one missed signal - will make them walk away.
So you give, you over-give, you hand people parts of yourself like offerings, hoping that if you just love hard enough, they'll stay... they never do, or they do - but they never really see you, not the you behind the mask, not the you who cries after being told "you're so strong", you never asked to be strong, you asked to be held.
And it's cruel - how the world praises your resilience without ever questioning why you had to be resilient in the first place.
No one sees how you collapse when the room is finally empty, no one hears the way you talk to yourself when the shame kicks in - blaming yourself for every silence, every distance, every person who left without saying goodbye.
You make excuses for them, you say they had their reasons, you tell yourself you're too sensitive, you've memorized the language of self-blame so fluently, you could write poetry in it, you already are.
Sometimes you wonder if you were born with too much feeling and not enough shield, you wonder if there's something wrong with how deeply you break over things others brush off, and then you hate yourself for breaking at all.
But listen - there is nothing wrong with you, you feel too much because this world has taught you to feel nothing, you hurt because you carry what others refuse to hold, you shatter because you were never taught how to ask for softness without sounding like a burden, and maybe no one has ever stayed long enough to see it - but you are not the broken one, you are the evidence of what love could be if it learned to kneel, you are the quiet that someone will one day choose to hear, not because you're screaming, but because they're finally listening.
But until then - I know you're tired, I know you're exhausted of being the strong one, the silent one, the forgotten one.
So here - rest, not everything has to be survived, not tonight, you don't have to prove your worth by bleeding for it.
You are enough in all your aching, all your unraveling, all your not-knowing-how-to-ask.
Let the quiet be heard for once.
Let it speak.
Let it say: I am here, I am hurting, please - stay.

There was a house where the silence screamed, where footsteps were warnings and breath meant war, she learned the language of the floorboards, how each groan spelled danger, how shadows could hold their breath and become a man.
A basement where time forgot to move, where light curled back on itself and everything smelled like rot and rust, and the end of innocence.
Each day the sun rose somewhere else, not here, here, he waited - with a voice that smiled and hands that lied, he dragged her down like some dark ritual, her legs small, her resistance smaller.
The air was thick with mildew and menace, and every creak of the stairs was a countdown.
She knew the sound of his zipper better than she knew her own voice, it came before the hand, before the hush, before her name was twisted into a thing she didn't recognize - "so cute", he whispered, his sour breath staining her cheek, his palm sealing her scream like a grave before the burial.
Her body a locked cabinet he broke open anyway, her mouth pressed shut by his hand, so tight she thought she'd disappear beneath it, her name became a curse only he could say.
Seven years is a long time to be dead but still breathing, a long time to collect bruises you can't point to, to count the days by how deeply you dissociate, to lie in bed, waiting for the footsteps, learning to pray in silence, learning that God had turned his face away.
And the walls - they were good at keeping secrets, the cement heard everything but never wept - not like her.
Her bones still ache with memory, each rib a frozen branch, cracking beneath the weight of winter, her heart shattered on repeat - like glassware dropped in slow motion that no one bothers to clean up.
"Don't cry, you'll wake up the house", but the house was already awake, it learned to listen like she did - without flinching.
The nightmares bloom nightly, sheets soaked with fear, her breath a stuttered, shattered siren, she wakes choking on the echoes of a voice she was never allowed to use.
Pain is a language, and she became fluent, she learned to smile with empty eyes, to eat silence for dinner and fear for dessert, she learned to scrub herself raw, but she still feel him clinging in places water couldn't reach, fingerprints etched into her skin.
She was a child, but not really - not after that, her toys became tombstones, her bed, a battlefield, sleep was a place she couldn't get to without barbed wire dreams.
She wakes now, still - drenched in panic, sheets soaked through like she'd been drowning all night, and maybe she was, maybe she always am.
Because healing doesn't come like spring, it comes like winter forgetting to leave, some mornings, her bones scream before she move, memories frozen, crying herself to sleep on repeat.
She carry ghosts inside her skin, they press through when the world is too loud, too close, she flinches at kindness, she distrust calm.
But even now, in this thicket of remembering, a part of her whispers, "you lived", and she did, not gently, not untouched, not completely.
She lived when no one heard her, she lived when love meant chains, she lived through every slammed door, every silenced scream, every time she thought death would be easier.
She lived, and she's still here, crumpled, yes, but breathing, bent, not broken, she is the aftermath that keeps growing - a wild, ruined garden refusing to die.

I loved you like the moon loves tides, pulling close, then pulling wide, a rhythm carved from ache and care, yet too much weight was in the air.
You were my lighthouse in the black, the one who always led me back, but even lighthouses loose light - and I, the storm, swallowed the night.
You saw the best when I was breaking, held my hand though they were shaking, but shadows clung to all I knew - even sunlight felt so blue. You saw the cracks before I did, found every place my soul had hid, you kissed the ghost behind my eyes, made peace where every panic lies.
You held my hand when I would shake, stood calm when I began to break, but love should never burn the one who gives and gets no return.
And though you said you'd never leave, I saw the weight you wore like grief, a smile stretched too thin to last, like flowers blooming in a blast.
I tried to be the sun, the shore, but what I gave just asked for more, my chest, a cage of crows and flame, whispered truths I couldn't name.
You held me through sleepless cries, the spirals, cuts, the anxious lies, but in your eyes, I came to see - you were fading while saving me.
And that's no life for love to live - to always take, to never give, I knew the cost, I knew the toll: to stay with me would wreck your soul.
So though it breaks what's left inside, I choose the hurt where you survive, if I could switch, if I could mend, if I could promise there's an end - I'd keep you close, I'd hold you tight, and walk with you into the light.
But I've been drowning far too long, to drag you down where you don't belong, so let me be the loss you mourn, not the burden you were born to carry past your own despair, you loved enough - it's not fair.
But you had to go where you can bloom, not wilt beside my inner tomb, I love you still, in quiet ways - in dark hours, in yesterdays.
I had to go, and you had too, for love like this can ruin you, and though you ache, I hope you know: to love you, I let you go.

I lit my hands to warm their nights, burned down my voice to make it right, bent every edge, broke every bone, to build them peace and feel alone.
I learned to smile through shattered glass, made laughter from the things that pass, carried their burdens without sound, till my own heart was underground.
They praised me when I played their part, but never reached within my heart, said, "you're so strong", as if that cured the years of silence I endured.
They loved the mask, the shape I wore, the version I was just before, but when I changed - when cracks showed through, they mourned the lie they thought was true.
"You're not yourself", they'd say with scorn, not knowing I was worn and torn, not knowing that the self they missed was built from bruises I dismissed.
I dimmed my light so theirs could burn, took hits for lessons they could learn, held steady in their thunder's path, and gave them grace instead of wrath.
I made my pain a hidden well, and filled it deep with "I'm just swell", till water rose past every breath, and kindness felt a lot like death.
And still, I stayed, and played the role - the healer with a hollow soul, the "safe one" they could always call, the one who'd never let them see her fall.
But I was falling all along, just good at dressing grief in song, I cried in rooms they never knew, and still asked them what they went through.
They missed the me that kept it light, not the one who fought the fear, of never truly being here.
I changed, yes - how could I not? When every wound was left to rot? When love felt more like debt to pay, and worth was just what I could weigh?
They called it selfish when you grow, when you say "no", when you let go, but it's not selfish to survive, to carve out space and stay alive.
I am not less for needing space, for letting my performance cease, for walking back into my skin, and not apologizing again.
And still I give - but not the same, not bleeding just to bear the blame, if loving me means shrinking small, then maybe don't love me at all.
But still it haunts - the need to be enough for those who don't see me, to earn what should be freely kept, to mourn the self I quietly wept.
And maybe that's the price I pay: to break in silence every day, to wear their coldness like perfume, and carry ghosts in every room.
But know this truth: I always cared, I gave too much, was never spared, and if they look, perhaps they'll see - what broke was love, not only me.