I repeat it to myself as I walk in circles inside my room.
You can never be good enough for people. They don’t want goodness. They want pieces. They want proof you can be consumed.
People will cut you in half without sharpening the knife, will chew slowly, thoughtfullyand still ask why you taste bitter.
And I let them. I wanted them to. There is something sick in tenderness, it begs to be eaten.
But I was good. I swear I was. I emptied myself carefully. I loved without strategy. I showed up whole.
It wasn’t enough, my love. Not even close.
My thoughts break and I am hurled back into now, into my body, into this breath that hurts.
Longing swells suddenly. My chest tightens. A knot rises in my throat, hard, obscene.
I whisper it to the moon, that ancient liar, knowing it spills the same cold light on your face wherever you are pretending to sleep.
The world is burning. I can feel it, heat behind the eyes, panic in the air. A plane is falling somewhere. Metal screaming. Gravity doing its work.
Someone is grabbing the wrong things on the way out, papers, keys, pride...leaving behind what mattered.
Someone is failing quietly.
Someone is dying unloved.
I cough. As if the smoke has reached me. As if grief has weight and it has settled in my lungs.
The room answers nothing. It only listens. It has learned that skill from me.
I stand still now. The floor is cold. The air, stale. My heartbeat loud enough to feel like an accusation.
Goodness is not a shield. It never was. It’s just a way of bleeding without screaming.
I was good and goodness did not save me.
It didn’t save you either.
It only made us softer for the knife.
There is a terrible loneliness in having done your best. No excuses left, no cruelty to blame, only the unbearable clarity that you gave everything and it still slipped through your hands like water.
The world keeps ending in small ways.
A siren fading. A light switching off somewhere. A door closing that won’t reopen.
I imagine you breathing. I have to.
It is the only way my chest loosens.
I imagine you untouched by the fire, by the falling metal, by the screaming.
I imagine you safe because imagining anything else would finish me.
If goodness counts for nothing, let it at least mean that somewhere under this same sky, you are alive, and the moon is wasting its light on you, and the world has not taken everything from you.
I press it against my ribs like a last confession no one can take away.
