Field notes from the in between

A collection of fragments, poems, and small observations from a quiet inner world. Nothing here is meant to be solved—only seen. The Four Doors are a way of paying attention.

[kurokilledthecat]

“I wouldn’t have done it that way.”

You didn’t even bother to show up.

At least they were trying.

For someone who always had the loudest opinion in every room, you were remarkably absent from every moment that actually mattered.

Yes, I’m angry. And after years of bending myself into someone smaller—working endlessly to become “better” for a person who admitted they would rather I die than reflect on the pain they caused me—I think I’ve earned the right to be.

Love doesn’t ask you to die for it.

Love doesn’t ask you to disappear.

Love asks you to become more alive, more yourself.

Sometimes loving someone means stepping away. Sometimes it means cheering for their life from the sidelines because their well-being matters more than your need to keep them close. That’s what love is. It wants the other person to flourish, even when you don’t get to be the one standing beside them.

Love tells you to write the story.

It tells you to draw the picture.

It reminds you to do the things that make you feel like yourself. It gently says, “It’s getting late—you should get some sleep,” instead of keeping you awake just to win one more argument.

I didn’t leave because I stopped loving you.

I left because, for the first time in a very long time, I loved myself enough to believe I deserved the kind of love that asks me to live.

[kurokilledthecat]

I told you that I wanted to die,

and you helped me dig my grave.

I told you living had become too hard,

so you loaded the gun

and placed it in my hands.

When all was said and done,

you knew which choice I’d made.

You stood in the doorway,

measuring silence against consequence.

You’d already taught me

there was peace—

there was honor—

in death.

For one terrible moment,

you almost let me go.

Then you remembered

there would be questions.

Your anger was never grief.

It was fear.

You didn’t choose my life.

You chose not to live

with the consequence

of my death.

[kurokilledthecat]

I would have died for you,

and you were happy to let me.

I cried for you,

and you didn’t care.

I wept for you,

and you only stared.

We’re arguing in circles;

my head’s a mess.

The house is on fire,

and you’re yelling about the dishes again.

I breathe in the smoke

and reach for your hands.

I fall back into you,

lose myself inside your plans.

Everything is black and blue.

You say it was me again.

I shouldn’t have raised my voice—

you were overwhelmed,

you had no choice.

No one blames you in the end.

I breathe in the smoke,

hear your voice through the flames.

I carry your pain,

yet somehow I’m still the one you call insane.

Why do we always come back here?

Nothing remains

but rotted floorboards

and empty air.

You say you see forever

as I reach for the door.

You block my way out

and strike the match once more.

Now you’re burning

the foundation itself.

Count to ten.

Close your eyes.

Maybe if I blink twice

it will disappear.

But memories don’t melt.

They stay cold as ice.

There’s nothing left now

but ash and bone.

Still, you ask me to remember

the days you built me a palace,

placed a crown upon my head,

and called it love.

[kurokilledthecat]

Spelled out in red,

You finally said the words.

You named what you did—

So why do I still feel cursed?

I thought I’d feel better

If you admitted you were wrong,

But I just feel more broken,

Like a bird without a song.

You gave me more proof

Than I ever really needed,

But maybe you thought

I’d be more easily defeated.

Do you think I’m more worn down and tired

Than my story will allow?

Do you think you sealed my soul so tightly

That your secrets won’t get out?

That’s the problem, babe—

My mouth stays quiet,

But my heart still wants to shout.

How am I supposed to destroy

A love I once knew?

How am I supposed to rain down fire

On the only home I ever grew?

Maybe you’re right, and I am too weak.

Or maybe you’re wrong.

Maybe I’m only getting started—

Because tonight,

You just handed me the gasoline

[kurokilledthecat]

I am trying to heal

in a house with no doors.

But it is made entirely of glass.

The walls breathe closer each night,

plaster ribs narrowing around my lungs,

and every window has become an eye.

I can feel them watching—

not just people,

sometimes memories,

sometimes expectations,

sometimes ghosts dressed as concern.

Even silence feels observed.

I move carefully,

like a deer drinking from a poisoned river,

afraid that one wrong tremor

will send every hidden thing scattering into the light.

There are entire graveyards inside me

that no one knows exist.

I carry them beneath my tongue,

rows of white stones etched with names

I am not allowed to say out loud.

The love I left behind

still follows me like smoke.

Some mornings I find it

caught in my hair,

woven through my clothes,

lingering in the hollow places

where forever was supposed to live.

I tell myself to keep walking.

I tell myself that a compass

can still point north

even after being struck by lightning.

But grief is a patient hunter.

It waits in reflections.

In familiar songs.

In the empty side of the bed

that no longer belongs to anyone.

It waits for me to become tired enough

to mistake loneliness for home.

And still,

I keep my secrets.

I stitch them shut with trembling hands,

threading darkness through wounds

that never had the chance to scar properly.

Some truths are too heavy to carry openly.

Some stories feel like glass pressed against the heart.

So I swallow them whole,

letting them settle inside me

like black pearls,

beautiful and painful

and impossible to explain.

Healing, they said,

as if it were a garden about to bloom

No one warned me

it would feel more like crossing an ocean

with stones sewn into my pockets.

No one warned me

how hard it would be

to keep from breaking

when every wave arrives carrying another version of myself—

the girl who stayed,

the girl who ran,

the girl who still loves,

the girl who knows she cannot go back.

They rise from the water

and reach for me.

I love them all.

I leave them all behind.

And every day,

with salt in my wounds

and storms in my chest,

I choose the horizon anyway.

Not because I am fearless.

Not because I am healed.

But because somewhere beyond the watchful eyes,

beyond the buried secrets,

beyond the ruins of a love I could not save,

there is a version of me

learning how to breathe again.

And if I can keep my heart intact

through one more night,

perhaps tomorrow

I will reach her.

[kurokilledthecat]

It’s easy to fall back into old habits.

It’s easy to let someone else take care of me.

It’s easy to run.

It’s easy to disappear into someone else’s plans.

But nothing about this was ever meant to be easy.

I didn’t walk away from eleven years

for easy.

I didn’t bury my forever

to chase another fantasy

that could wash away with the tide.

Staying gone has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done,

and you think I did it for him.

But I stay gone for me.

I stay gone for the apartment

where I open the curtains

and let the light in.

I stay gone for a future

where I have a say

in where my money goes,

where my life goes,

where I go.

I stay gone so I never again have to watch someone

disrespect my father on his worst days

and call it love for me.

I stay gone because you never deserved the place you took.

Maybe that sounds unfair.

But years taught me how you take

and take

and take

until nothing remains

except me in the corner crying

while your laughter fills the room.

No.

I refuse to return to a home

where my happiness existed only

in the brief space between opening the door

and discovering your newest mood.

And I refuse to be someone’s everything

the way I was for you.

At least for now.

Because for now,

I deserve to be everything

for myself

[kurokilledthecat]

For years I slept beside the flames.

I let them climb the walls

as if fire were a normal thing.

I learned to breathe the smoke.

Found comfort in the ash,

the heat,

the crackling warnings I pretended not to hear.

I stayed for so long

I rarely feared I would burn,

because I never believed

there was anything beyond the fire.

Now I stand in the yard

watching the house collapse,

and you scream that I don’t care.

You tell me to bring buckets,

to save what remains.

But you never tried to leave either.

You were comfortable

when I was the one being burned.

For years I carried water,

arms aching from the weight of it,

while you walked room to room

pouring gasoline.

And now,

with the roof already falling,

with the beams already blackened through,

you ask me to save this house

as though it wasn’t lost

long before I walked away

[kurokilledthecat]

It wasn’t the fire that frightened me

It was how comfortable you were living in smoke

While I spent years going out for buckets of water

You spent years learning to breathe ash

Then cursed the earth for giving you bad lungs

While I was fighting fire

You rearranged the furniture

And when a door finally opened

You called it abandonment

Disloyalty, insanity

When I stepped outside to breathe

[kurokilledthecat]

He held me like I was something that mattered.

And for the first time in a long while,

It wasn’t because all of the answers to save me existed, it’s that the door did not demand that I walk through it.

It stood open

Patient.

Sunlight spilling across the threshold,

warming the floorboards of a house

I had not yet built.

While I struggled to survive the night,

he spoke of tomorrow with an almost foolish certainty.

Not grand futures.

Just small ones.

A small apartment.

A shelf crowded with my favorite books.

A meal left on the table.

A coat hanging by the door.

A reason to come home.

And somehow,

those fragile things felt stronger

than all of the darkness behind me.

And through him I caught a glimpse

A room beyond the ruins

A small warm Nook where happiness didn’t feel like trespassing

[kurokilledthecat]

I kept your secrets

Expecting them not to touch me

I was afraid of the dark while basking in your light

I knew something was off

I just didn’t quite know why

And when you admitted you knew

That your secret hurt me too

When you let it touch me

The secret I kept for years

I couldn’t hold on more than a few hours

- the monster became too real

[kurokilledthecat]

He found me after the white walls and wristbands,

after they sent me home stitched together with pamphlets and well wishes

His smile the brightest thing I’d seen for days

He loved me like a boy trying to stop a flood

with cardboard, string lights, and bare hands.

There was something painfully honest about him —

the way he believed hunger could be solved with reminders,

My pain with conversation,

loneliness with pure love

How he believed he could fix me if he just tried a little harder

He spoke about the future

like it was a treehouse we could build before winter came,

crooked and swaying and miraculous.

And maybe it would have collapsed.

Maybe devotion is not architecture.

Maybe tenderness is not enough to keep a house standing.

But God—

for a little while,

it kept me alive.

[kurokilledthecat]

Steel did not ask too much of me.

I think that is why I lingered, why I kept returning to the door.

At the time, Spite still ran through me like a live wire beneath the skin. Quiet from a distance, dangerously electric up close.

Steel never seemed phased.

The door stood firm, swaying only to my touch—otherwise unmoved by observation and uninterested in softening simply because I had arrived.

There was comfort in the quiet, though I could not quite explain it yet.

I remember standing there longer than I meant to, hand hovering over the handle without touching it.

Not because I did not want to, but because some things hold their shape no matter how badly you would like them to change.

[kurokilledthecat]

On four doors

Steel kept me alive. Stain made staying possible. Nook gave me somewhere to stay. And you watched from the threshold so I did not drift too far from the ground.

[kurokilledthecat]

Four doors

I stood in front of four doors. Not metaphorically at first. Just in the quiet way you find yourself somewhere and realize, after a moment too long, that it means something to you. My eyes scan their wooden frames, I look at the grain, I notice the wear patterns wondering where they’ve been. I don’t even think about how long I’ve been staring before wondering whether to walk through…then I notice their names. Steel, Stain, Nook…the fourth nameless a half mirror half and narrow window set into the grain.

I didn’t choose them. Or maybe I did in the way we instinctively reach for the things we need most. Steel was the kind of strength I learned to lean on when I could not hold myself upright. Reliable in the way something can be without being close. It held me steady when I needed it to, even when I did not know how to ask gently.

Stain came quietly, and then stayed. Not sharply, but persistently. Something that settled into the fabric of my life until I stopped being able to tell where it began and I ended.

I sighed, Nook was a softer kind of presence. A place that felt like care, even when it felt a little too small to fully stand inside. It reminded me that being looked after could be its own kind of gravity.

And the fourth door—my unknown—did not give me much to hold onto at all. Only a partial reflection. A small frame of myself looking back, as if asking whether I was ready to be seen differently, or not yet at all.

I turned my back on all four doors walking back down the hallway only to find a mirror reflecting my unknown door back at me.

[kurokilledthecat]

Why I can’t just say hello

For as long as I can remember, I have thought in multiple perspectives, multiple realities, multiple timelines.

There is this version: the one where I lost a relationship after surviving a nine-year abusive marriage.

But there is another version too—the one where I lost a loving marriage of nine years.

Then there is your perspective. In some versions, you are the villain. In others, the victim. Sometimes neutral. Sometimes just a confused man, unsure of what is happening inside himself.

I cannot think in black and white. I do not see life in yes or no. Everything arrives multifaceted—messy, complicated, painful, beautiful.

Maybe that is why I am always confused.

I think about the version where I died. If my suicide attempt had succeeded, would I have become a martyr? Would people have finally seen the monster in you? Or would you have told them how devastated you were to lose the love of your life?

Would you remember our Sunday mornings? Watching me sit at the mirror, putting on makeup, choosing my prettiest dress for church. Two quiet hours where we looked almost happy.

I do not know how to live in the in-between anymore.

How am I supposed to exist between not yet and never again?

I am not patient enough for uncertainty. My heart has never been strong enough to survive indecision, and I think yours suffers from the same weakness.

I do not want you anymore.

At least, not the future that comes with you.

You have hurt me too deeply for trust to ever grow back in the same place. But leaving you—truly leaving you—feels unbearable because it is permanent. And permanence terrifies me.

I still love you. I never stopped.

But no matter how much you soften your character, it is still your face. A wolf can change its behavior, maybe, but never its nature entirely.

I cannot trust you again.

I cannot go back.

But somehow, I still cannot fully leave.

I am stuck between no longer and not yet.

You hurt me. You made me bleed. And for you, I would have bled forever. But someone showed me love does not have to feel like survival.

You think that makes me a cheater, or a liar, or whatever ugly thing helps you sleep at night. But the truth is simpler than that: someone showed me I deserved gentleness instead of lessons.

I deserved more than crying myself to sleep every night, lying awake until five in the morning waiting for you to want me.

I should never have had to beg for comfort.

I should never have had to ask for basic human decency.

But with you, I did.

And with you, I almost died.

You once told me you liked that I would have died for you.

The terrifying thing is that it was not always bad.

I remember when you loved me gently enough that I felt safe.

Do you remember when we met?

I thought you looked like every person I had ever loved somehow stitched into one body. I never told you that. I do not know why.

You were charming. Funny. You made me feel brave. Important. Like maybe you held the answer to all the pain I carried.

You promised as much.

They always do.

Then you became another source of it.

I remember choosing outfits together before our first big event. Having dinner with your grandmother. Falling in love with your family almost instantly. Dancing under the lights afterward, not caring that I could not dance because with you, I felt like I could do anything.

Then I got the ring.

And suddenly it felt like I had no say anymore.

I remember the first bruise.

I had just come home after spending a week with you. My boss noticed the mark on my arm immediately. When I brushed it off, she looked closer and said quietly, “It looks like someone grabbed you.”

How was I supposed to explain that the engagement I had been celebrating had already become frightening?

How was I supposed to admit that the man I loved had grabbed me too hard because my anxiety made me “too much to handle”?

Our marriage lasted three months before it happened again.

You said it was a safety issue. I was panicking while you drove, and instead of pulling over, you broke my glasses.

When my cousin came to get me, he begged me not to return.

Two days later, I went back anyway.

A month later, you were arrested. Purple and black bruises spread across my back while you insisted I had “lashed out first,” that you had simply reacted poorly. Somehow, there was always a reason it became my fault. I was too emotional. Too irrational. Too difficult to love correctly.

One police officer told my parents you would kill me someday.

I left for two months.

Then I came back.

Now it has been two months without you again.

Two months of quiet.

Two months of grief and confusion and sleeping alone.

Two months of walking into my home without bracing myself for what mood might be waiting inside.

Two months of laughing without worrying I am too loud.

Two months without fearing your hands.

Your breath on my neck.

Two months of reclaiming the word “no.”

Two months of feeling ownership over my own body again.

And when you ask if we can try again—when you ask why I will not give us another chance—the honest answer is this:

Because I would give you a million chances.

And all it would take is one moment of weakness for me to disappear back into you again. Another two months. Another two years.

Or maybe next time, I leave in a body bag.

And somewhere deep inside myself, I know this:

If you truly wanted to change, you would have done it years ago.