I don’t know when I became this tired.
Not the kind of tired
that disappears beneath warm blankets
or after eight hours of sleep,
but the kind that settles into your bones,
the kind that makes waking up
feel like another thing
you have to survive.
Some days,
I look at my life
and all I can see
are the places where I think I failed.
I failed at family
at building the kind of love
that feels like home,
the kind where you can fall apart
and know someone will still be there
when all the pieces hit the floor.
I failed at becoming
who I thought I would be.
There are degrees I never earned,
dreams I never finished,
doors I never walked through,
and sometimes I wonder
who I would have been
if I had just made
one different choice.
At least,
that’s what the voice inside me says
when the nights are too quiet
and I have no one to argue with it.
It tells me
I wasn’t enough to make love stay.
Wasn’t patient enough.
Wasn’t beautiful enough.
Wasn’t worthy enough.
And money has a way
of turning every mistake
into a number,
every struggle into another reminder
that I am not where
I thought I would be by now.
The aching question
of whether anyone truly loves me
or if I have simply become good
at pretending I don’t need them to.
And then there are the two little lives
I never got the chance to know.
Two dreams
I carried inside of me.
Two pieces of my heart
that left this world
before I ever got to hold them
the way I wanted to.
People expect grief to have an ending.
It just changed clothes
and found new places to hide.
Sometimes it hides in my body.
In the weight I gained
while trying to survive myself.
In the mirror
I avoid looking into too long
because I barely recognize
the woman staring back.
I want to tell her
I’m sorry.
Sorry I couldn’t protect her
from everything.
Sorry I spent so many years
hating her
for the ways she coped
with being in pain.
Sometimes my mind goes somewhere dark.
So dark
that for one frightening moment
I wonder what it would feel like
to simply not be here.
I think
I just want the hurting to stop.
I want the noise in my head
to finally be quiet.
I want one day
where I don’t have to carry
every mistake I have ever made
like evidence against myself.
Because I am so tired
of being my own prosecutor.
So tired of putting my life on trial
and finding myself guilty
every single time.
God,
if I could start over.
I would take everything I know now
and place it gently
into the hands
of the girl I used to be.
I would tell her
who not to trust.
When to stop shrinking herself
just to make other people comfortable.
I would tell her
to save her money.
Hold certain people closer.
Let certain people go sooner.
I would tell her
that loneliness beside the wrong person
hurts worse
than loneliness by yourself.
I would tell her
not to waste so much time
begging people to love her
when she should have been learning
how to love herself.
And maybe that
is the cruelest part of all.
I have all this wisdom now
and nowhere to send it
but forward.
Still wondering
what my life could have been.
Still mourning people,
dreams,
children,
love,
and versions of myself
that no longer exist.
I don’t know what comes next.
I don’t know how to fix
everything that feels broken.
I don’t even know
why some mornings
the sadness feels heavier
than it did the night before.
beneath every failure
I have named myself,
beneath the loneliness
and the regret
and the unbearable weight
of wishing I could begin again
there is still a small part of me
that has not disappeared.
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