i’ll never forget how lonely those early days felt.

the world felt like a house locked from the inside,
and i kept knocking like an idiot, still believing in manners

mornings were waiting rooms,
the air thick with other people’s plans
and often i learned to shrink

i measured my worth in small transactions
a returned text,
a glance that didn’t slide away,
an appointment kept

the sums were always short
my ledger was always negative and
no one bothered to ask

i learned to celebrate crumbs as if they were banquets,
practiced gratitude
until it resembled a prayer

i became fluent in absence
the silence after hello,
the way voices softened around me,
the neat interruptions that proved
i was never the matter at hand

i watered a garden that never knew my name
and watched everything i offered
turn to dust on the windowsill

i held myself like a promise deferred,
postponed
bracketed

i rehearsed bravery until my hands cramped,
then settled into the habit of not being owed

patience turned bitter
and often endurance felt like a faith
with an empty altar

at night, i catalogued the small betrayals
plans that dissolved,
conversations cut mid-sentence,
the easy forgetfulness of people
who remembered only themselves


this is a confession.

i am done excusing absence as inevitability
i am done measuring my worth
by the attention of those
who treat me as optional
i am done calling invisibility survival

if you read this and think the cure is simple:
speak

don’t polish guilt into gestures
say what you mean
make room
refuse the easy cruelty
of looking past someone
as if they were some scenery

and to the younger version of me,
sitting in cold rooms
with colder feet

i’m sorry i told you to wait
i’m sorry i made patience
a virtue that cost too much

you deserved a witness

i won’t let those early days
define what comes next

if memory insists on carrying weight,
let it carry this instead:

i kept the lights on anyway

even when the house was mostly shadows,
even when no one came to check the fuse,
i tended the small flame.

and that stubborn, foolish light
is enough proof i existed.

And if the heart can break, it can also begin again, fragile and trembling, but unashamed of its beating.

the heart doesn’t know which sin weighs heavier
the emptiness of absence,
or the guilt of wishing for absence
when presence begins to burn

i stand between the two fears,
unable to step forward,
unable to retreat,
watching love turn into a trembling room
with no doors

i was meant for greater things
not to be folded into the quiet corners of other people’s comfort,
not to wear the smallness they hand me like a gift i should be grateful for.
the world has tried to carve me down to fit its narrow shelves,
but there is something in me that will not be contained,
a fire that remembers its own light even in the dark.

i have walked through rooms where silence was expected,
where ambition was called arrogance,
where the weight in my chest was mistaken for burden instead of purpose.
still, i carry it
this unshakable knowing that my hands were meant
to shape more than what they’ve been given,
that my voice was meant to reach further than the walls in front of me.

it is not greed to want the sky when you were born with wings.
it is not rebellion to refuse the chains that were never yours to wear.
to be anything less than what i am meant to become
would be death
the kind you don’t notice until you wake one day
and find your name has been forgotten
even by your own reflection

i’m tired of the facades. so if you’re going to step through the door again, bring all of you or bring nothing. let’s stop the polite distance. if you don’t come home, then tell me straight because walls build themselves against silence and i’m done with building.

worldly pleasures are for worldly beings
but you were never meant to stay
resist the pull of passing things
be better, even if it aches to turn away