Written out of the weight I never got to name, dissociating.
╴╴╴╴╴⊹ꮺ˚ ╴╴╴╴╴⊹˚
It feels like I’ve been carrying every version of myself, folded into my own organs, quiet and still, as if breathing too loud might wake them. There’s a little girl under my ribs. She holds her breath with me. She’s small, and she knows how to stay silent. I think she learned that before she learned how to ask for anything.
╴╴╴╴╴⊹ꮺ˚ ╴╴╴╴╴⊹˚
Somewhere behind my sternum, there’s someone older. She’s exhausted from carving pieces off of herself just to make it easier for her to feel the pain. There are no scars on the outside, but something under her collarbone remembers the shape of every blade.
╴╴╴╴╴⊹ꮺ˚ ╴╴╴╴╴⊹˚
Then there’s the one who came after. The one I became when my father died. She lives somewhere deeper—beneath the others, maybe inside the space he used to fill. She is older than all of them. She is soft-spoken, endlessly giving, always warm. She doesn’t ask for anything. She believes in love the way children believe in magic. But she belongs to loss. She is the version of me that stopped expecting softness and tried to become it instead. The one that holds others together so she won’t fall apart herself. The one who smiles through grief, like it’s something holy.
╴╴╴╴╴⊹ꮺ˚ ╴╴╴╴╴⊹˚
They don’t talk to each other. They don’t speak. They just lie there, as if my body is the only place they were ever allowed to rest. I wonder if that’s why I feel heavy even when I haven’t eaten. If that’s why my chest sometimes aches when no one has touched me.
╴╴╴╴╴⊹ꮺ˚ ╴╴╴╴╴⊹˚
When someone says something kind, when I let myself be touched without flinching, I feel a shift. I feel the soft motion of someone turning over in their sleep.
I’m not sure who I’d become if they collectively looked me in the eye.
╴╴╴╴╴⊹ꮺ˚ ╴╴╴╴╴⊹˚
You might want to visit my Rooms collection.
