Sometimes I wonder if I’m real at all—or just a memory someone forgot to let go of, a ghost that thinks he’s a boy, a shadow rehearsing how to smile.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m real at all—or just a memory someone forgot to let go of, a ghost that thinks he’s a boy, a shadow rehearsing how to smile. They say time heals, but all it’s ever done is sharpen my disguise. We don’t heal—we just hide our cracks beneath prettier masks, learn to laugh with hollow lungs, to nod when our chest is caving in. If love is meant to fix us, why does it splinter deeper when it’s real? I grew up with love that bruised, love with strings and punishments, love that turned softness into a trap. So now when kindness brushes my skin, I flinch—expecting the cruelty that used to follow. And still, I love with everything left in me, even when my body trembles in doubt. The pain never left. It carved me into silence, became the truest part of me, a scream so quiet it never stops. I thought loneliness meant being abandoned—but the cruelest kind is standing in a room full of love and still feeling invisible, still feeling like I’m disappearing. Sometimes I think I died long ago, and this is just the aftershock—my body forgot to fall, so I echo here, a cup cracked and forgotten, still asked to carry water for everyone else. What if I’m still breathing not because I survived, but because what waits after is worse than this half-life? If I disappeared now, the world would spin unbroken, no pause, no shift, just silence where I used to stand. And the only reason I stay—is because I know how it feels to be that close to vanishing, and I can’t let someone I love break the way I did. But I won’t lie—there are nights the thought presses sharp against my ribs, like a blade begging to be let in. Nights where the rope, the pills, the jump, all whisper my name in chorus, promising relief that love never gave. I’ve sat on the bathroom floor, razor in hand, carving honesty into skin because words weren’t enough. Red rivers spilling truths no one else wanted to hear. Each line a map of where it hurt the most, each scar a gravestone for a part of me that couldn’t keep living. They call it self-destruction, but sometimes it felt like survival. Like if I didn’t bleed, the weight inside me would crack my bones instead. The sting was control, the blood was proof: I’m still here. I can still feel. Even when all I wanted was not to. They told me monsters weren’t real. But no one warned me they could wear my father’s face, my mother’s hands, my own skin in the mirror. No one warned me that one day I’d see my eyes and wonder—how much of this poison bled into those I love, how much of me turned into the very thing I feared. So don’t cry for me. Just don’t let me vanish. I shattered long ago, but I learned how to walk while broken. I used to dream. Now I only wait—for the hurt, for the leaving, for the day I stop pretending. I don’t know who I am without the pain. It’s been my constant companion, a cruel inheritance stitched to my skin. I wear smiles like armor, lies like thread, because the truth makes people run. I scream in silence, live like I’m already gone—a memory that breathes. I am a firecracker in a thunderstorm—bright, loud, fleeting, called beautiful, yet destined to burn out unless someone shields me from the rain. It is heavy, believing you are the problem. Thinking people breathe easier when you leave the room, that you’re the glitch in the pattern. So you make yourself small, sacrifice quietly, bleed without an altar, because your pain feels cheaper than letting someone else carry it. And still, the guilt whispers: You don’t deserve to hurt. Others have it worse. So you swallow it down, convince yourself suffering in silence is noble, that being strong means never breaking. And piece by piece you perform "okay" so well that even you forget what it means to be honest. But beneath the mask, you’re suffocating. No one sees the cost because you’ve made it look easy. Inside, you’re screaming into a void that never answers. And yet—with all the scars, with all the ghosts, with all the broken ways I’ve learned to stay—I still love. Even when it terrifies me. Even when I feel undeserving. Even when I am all ache and fracture. I love. Because maybe love doesn’t fix us. Maybe it just keeps us here—breathing, believing, bleeding, trying. And if nothing else, let this truth remain: I broke a long time ago, but even shattered, I still chose to stay.