Rita Caronte

𝓑𝓾𝓽 𝓲 𝓱𝓪𝓿𝓮 𝓪𝓵𝔀𝓪𝔂𝓼 𝓫𝓮𝓮𝓷 𝓪 𝓬𝓸𝔂𝓸𝓽𝓮 🌟

[ritacaronte]

The Waiting Room

I spent so many years believing I would die young that I never learned how to live beyond the next disaster. Every plan felt hypothetical. Every dream came with an asterisk. Every version of my future looked unfinished, like a sentence abandoned halfway through.

Death was never a monster to me. It was an appointment. An inevitability. Something waiting patiently somewhere ahead, checking its watch while I stumbled through life pretending I had more time than I actually did.

So I waited for it.

Not actively. Not dramatically. I still went to school. Still bought books. Still laughed at stupid jokes and fell in love with impossible people. But underneath everything was the same quiet assumption: eventually someone would realize I had overstayed.

Yet years kept passing.

Birthdays arrived. Seasons changed. Entire chapters of my life ended and new ones began. Friends disappeared and returned. Cities changed. I changed. And somehow death never came to collect what I had already convinced myself belonged to it.

Sometimes I wonder if I've spent my entire life sitting in a waiting room for an appointment that was never scheduled.

Maybe that's why surviving feels so strange.

Not because life suddenly became beautiful. Not because I found some secret meaning hidden beneath suffering. But because every year I remain here feels increasingly accidental. Like I was certain the story would end in the first act and now I've somehow wandered into chapters nobody prepared me for.

There are mornings when I still wake up surprised.

Surprised by sunlight on the wall.

Surprised by messages from people who would notice if I disappeared.

Surprised by the fact that there are books I haven't read yet, places I haven't seen, conversations I haven't had.

Surprised that part of me still wants those things.

And maybe that's the cruel joke.

I thought I was staying alive because death hadn't asked for me yet.

But the longer I remain, the harder that explanation becomes.

Because somewhere along the way I started collecting reasons.

A song. A friend. A future. A laugh. A promise. A person whose existence quietly became part of my daily rituals.

Tiny things.

Ridiculous things.

The sort of things that should not be powerful enough to anchor a human being to the world.

And yet they are.

Now when I imagine death, I no longer see a destination. I see an interruption. A hand reaching into a story that, despite everything, I am no longer ready to leave unfinished.

Which is perhaps the most shocking thing of all.

Not that I survived.

But that somewhere between expecting to die and accidentally continuing to live, I became curious about what happens next.

And for now, that curiosity seems to be enough.

-Rita Caronte

[ritacaronte]

The Problem With Constellations

You were supposed to be easy.

Not simple.

Never simple.

But safe.

The kind of person I could call at two in the morning just to tell you the moon looked strange tonight.

The kind of person who understood my silences without trying to solve them.

The kind of person I never had to translate myself for.

You were supposed to stay there.

On your side of the map.

The territory marked friendship.

Familiar.

Reliable.

Home.

And for a while, you did.

Then something shifted.

Not all at once.

Not dramatically.

No lightning strike.

No movie scene.

Just a thousand tiny moments stacking themselves together until they became impossible to ignore.

The way your laugh started living in my head long after conversations ended.

The way bad days felt smaller when I knew I'd hear from you.

The way my chest recognized your name before my phone even finished lighting up.

Small things.

Dangerous things.

The sort of things people mistake for coincidence until it's too late.

I keep trying to tell myself this is nothing.

Just affection.

Just attachment.

Just the natural consequence of caring about someone for too long.

But then you smile at me and my thoughts scatter like frightened birds.

And I remember that friendship was never supposed to feel like standing at the edge of a cliff wondering how far the sky goes.

The worst part is

I don't even know if I want more.

Not in the way other people seem to.

My heart has never worked according to those rules.

Desire visits me rarely.

Like a comet.

Beautiful.

Unpredictable.

Gone before I understand it.

But you—

you make me wonder.

You make me curious about futures I usually don't allow myself to imagine.

And that feels far more dangerous than certainty.

Because if I knew I wanted you completely,

I could survive that.

If I knew I only wanted friendship,

I could survive that too.

But this?

This terrible middle?

This constellation with no name?

I don't know what to do with it.

Sometimes I catch myself looking at you

and thinking

that if there is anyone I could learn an entirely new language for,

it would be you.

Then panic arrives.

Because some things are too precious to risk.

And you are one of them.

I know what people say.

Tell him.

Be honest.

Take the chance.

As if hearts were bridges instead of fault lines.

As if losing you would be survivable.

As if I could simply gamble with the person who has become part of my everyday life.

Part of my rituals.

Part of my sense of home.

So I say nothing.

I memorize.

The shape of your laughter.

The stories you repeat when you're tired.

The dreams you only admit to when you think nobody is listening.

I carry them carefully.

Like sacred things.

Like relics.

Like evidence.

And maybe one day these feelings will become smaller.

Maybe they will settle back into friendship.

Maybe they will disappear entirely.

Or maybe they'll keep growing quietly beneath the surface

like roots.

Invisible.

Patient.

Waiting.

I don't know.

What I do know

is that every time I imagine a future without you in it,

something inside me goes terribly still.

And every time I imagine telling you,

I see the stars falling out of their constellations.

So here I remain.

Somewhere between friendship and confession.

Between gratitude and longing.

Between what I feel

and what I am willing to lose.

And God,

I wish you were easier to stop caring about.

-Rita Caronte

[ritacaronte]

Afterlife

Sometimes I think death will not arrive as a door.

Not a tunnel flooded with light. Not a voice calling my name from somewhere beyond the horizon of existence. Not a revelation waiting patiently behind the machinery of the universe.

Sometimes I think it will feel exactly like this.

Like gravity forgetting me.

Like my body becoming a distant rumor. A story I once heard about someone else. Something that happened long ago to a stranger whose face I can almost remember.

The room is the first thing to leave.

The walls lose their loyalty. The ceiling drifts upward, slow and silent, as if it has finally remembered that it belongs to the stars and not to me. Everything begins to recede—the furniture, the air, the century I was born into. Even my heartbeat feels impossibly far away.

I cannot tell whether the world is moving away from me or if I am the one dissolving from it.

Maybe there is no difference.

Existence itself seems submerged beneath dark water, and I am watching it from somewhere deeper, where sound arrives softened and every certainty loses its edges.

When I close my eyes, the universe opens.

Not as darkness.

Never darkness.

Something softer.

A cathedral built from forgotten moons. Silver rivers flowing through endless black. Entire galaxies blooming inside one another like flowers that learned how to survive without sunlight. Constellations stitched together by invisible wounds.

And suddenly I understand why ancient people filled the heavens with gods.

Because what else could you call something this beautiful?

I drift through it.

Or perhaps it drifts through me.

Language becomes unreliable here. There are no proper words for becoming less human. No grammar for the moment your soul realizes it was never solid to begin with.

The stars move through my ribs.

Not around them.

Through them.

As if my body has become a window.

As if I have become transparent enough for eternity to pass unhindered.

And somewhere beyond fear, beyond memory, beyond the exhausting weight of being a person, I feel them.

The dead.

Not as ghosts.

Not as faces.

Not as voices.

As warmth.

A familiar warmth.

The kind that settles in your chest before recognition reaches your mind.

I cannot see them, but I know they are there.

Every person I have ever loved. Every animal buried beneath gardens. Every version of myself that disappeared quietly and left no grave behind. Every dream that died before it learned how to speak.

Not gone.

Never gone.

Only translated into another language.

And suddenly death feels ridiculous.

This thing I spent years fearing. This shadow I carried like prophecy. This certainty that followed me through childhood and settled beside me at every difficult moment.

From here it looks so small.

A river crossing.

A change of address.

A sentence continuing onto the next page.

The universe hums around me with something that feels suspiciously like tenderness.

Ancient.

Patient.

Infinite.

Like a mother rocking a frightened child back to sleep.

For the first time in years, I stop resisting.

I stop grieving.

I stop carrying every sharp piece of myself as if suffering were proof that I existed.

I become weightless.

Not happy.

Not sad.

Something older than both.

Something quieter.

Like returning home to a place I do not remember leaving.

Maybe this is what eternity really is.

Not endless time.

Endless belonging.

The certainty that nothing is truly lost.

Only changed.

Only scattered into different forms of light.

Then, from very far away, someone says my name.

Softly.

The cathedral begins to fold inward. The silver rivers collapse into themselves. One by one, the moons extinguish their glow.

And gravity remembers me.

The room returns.

The ceiling.

The body.

The impossible burden of having bones again.

But before everything settles, before the universe finishes placing me back inside myself, I bring something with me.

A secret.

Small enough to fit inside a heartbeat.

Large enough to contain entire galaxies.

That if there is an afterlife, it is not judgment.

Not punishment.

Not reward.

It is recognition.

It is the universe looking at every broken thing that has ever existed and whispering:

You were never separate from me.

And for one impossible, shining second,

that feels true.

-Rita Caronte

[ritacaronte]

The Language I Love In

I do not love the way stories promised.

Not in lightning strikes. Not in bodies colliding like destiny finally running out of excuses.

My love has always been quieter than that.

A strange constellation.

A language spoken by people willing to stay awake through each other's storms.

I know there are songs about hunger.

Poems about fire.

Entire civilizations built around the idea that love must arrive like an earthquake to be real.

But I have spent most of my life standing at the edge of desire like someone watching the ocean without needing to drown in it.

And still—

when I love someone,

the universe changes shape.

Not because I want their body.

Because suddenly their existence becomes sacred.

I start collecting them.

Not photographs.

Details.

The way they hesitate before admitting they're hurt.

The exact hour their sadness usually arrives.

Which song they play when the world becomes unbearable.

How their voice sounds when exhaustion pulls honesty from places fear normally guards.

I memorize these things the way ancient sailors memorized stars.

As survival.

As devotion.

As prayer.

Because my love language has never been touch.

It is attention.

Fierce, unrelenting, almost holy attention.

I want to know which nightmares still live under your ribs.

I want to learn every version of your laugh.

I want to notice when your smile is two millimeters smaller than yesterday.

I want to be the person who says:

"You seem quieter today."

before the tears arrive.

The person who remembers the doctor's appointment.

The medication.

The food you forgot to eat.

The book you mentioned once at three in the morning and assumed nobody would remember.

I would remember.

God.

I would remember everything.

Because loving someone, for me, is not possession.

It is witnessing.

It is standing at the edge of another person's existence and saying:

"I see you."

"I see the parts you apologize for."

"I see the fear."

"I see the scars."

"I see the complicated machinery holding your heart together."

"And I am not leaving just because it rattles."

Maybe that sounds small to people who measure love in grand gestures.

But I think there is something epic about choosing tenderness over and over again.

Something heroic about learning the geography of another soul.

I would rather know what makes your hands shake than own every star in the sky.

I would rather hear you say

"I made it home safe"

than receive a thousand roses.

I would rather spend years becoming your safest place

than one night becoming your fantasy.

Because my love was never built for conquest.

It was built for shelter.

For open curtains on difficult mornings.

For tea left waiting on the kitchen table.

For text messages that say:

"Have you eaten?"

and secretly mean

"Please stay alive."

For futures so ordinary they become miraculous.

Your shoes by the door.

Your laughter in another room.

A life quiet enough for both of us to finally rest.

And maybe that is why I love the way I do.

Because I am gray.

A creature of thresholds.

Of almosts.

Of feelings that bloom slowly and roots that grow deep before flowers ever appear.

Desire visits me like a comet.

Rare. Beautiful. Unpredictable.

But love—

love is different.

Love is the gravity holding entire galaxies together.

Love is learning the shape of your wounds without trying to own them.

Love is choosing you on the days when choosing is an action, not a feeling.

Love is knowing exactly where your darkness lives

and bringing a lantern anyway.

So if you ever wonder how I love,

do not look for fire.

Look for the person

remembering your favorite tea.

Saving messages they'll never admit they reread.

Learning your silences like sacred texts.

Checking the weather in your city.

Leaving space for your fears to sit beside mine.

Look for the one planting gardens in places everyone else abandoned.

Look for the one watering flowers before they have to ask.

That will be me.

Loving you

in the quiet, terrifying, beautiful way

the stars love the night—

never demanding to be touched,

and still

lighting the entire sky.

-Rita Caronte

[ritacaronte]

The Flowers They Never Watered

I have always imagined I would leave early.

Not dramatically.

Not with thunder splitting the sky or strangers writing elegies for a girl they never knew.

More like frost settling over spring buds,

quietly convincing them they were never meant to bloom.

I carried that certainty the way children carry lucky charms:

close to the skin, without questioning why it was there.

I never learned how to picture myself old.

Wrinkled hands. Grey hair. A future that stretched farther than the next disaster.

My imagination always stopped short,

as if somewhere inside me there was a clock missing its hands.

I loved recklessly because of it.

As if every goodbye might be prophecy.

As if every tenderness needed to be consumed quickly,

before time remembered I wasn't supposed to stay.

And some nights,

when grief lays its head against my shoulder,

death doesn't look monstrous.

It looks familiar.

Like the empty swing in a playground after dusk.

Like a seat reserved in a classroom I left too soon.

Like a garden path lined with flowers they forgot to water,

beautiful things wilting before anyone noticed they were thirsty.

I don't think I want to die.

Not really.

I think I am just tired

of carrying the feeling that I was built for an unfinished story.

Tired of treating survival like borrowed time.

Tired of introducing myself to happiness

with one foot already facing the exit.

But still—

I buy books I haven't read yet.

I make promises to versions of me I haven't become.

I leave the curtains open for morning.

And maybe that is hope:

this small rebellion

of planting trees beneath a sky I was certain I would never grow old enough to stand beneath.

Maybe living

is learning

that some flowers bloom late,

and some frightened children

mistake fear

for fate.

And maybe

just maybe,

I was never destined

to die young.

Only taught

to expect it.

-Rita Caronte

[ritacaronte]

the overthinker

I say I think too much.

I repeat it like a diagnosis,

as if it explains something,

as if it were enough to justify why everything feels heavier than it should.

I analyze.

I take apart every gesture, every word, every silence

until it's clean,

understandable,

safe.

And during that process,

I don't feel.

Or at least,

that's what I tell myself.

Because thinking looks a lot like control.

Like giving structure to something

that is really just chaos.

If I understand it,

it won't hurt the same.

If I explain it,

it won't cut through me.

If I see it coming,

it can't catch me off guard.

That's what I tell myself.

But it isn't entirely true.

Because while I'm thinking,

I'm avoiding.

Avoiding that exact moment when something is felt without filters,

without logic,

without that layer of language that makes it manageable.

I avoid not knowing what to do with it.

I avoid the discomfort of being unable to fix it.

I avoid the raw realization that something matters to me

more than I want to admit.

So I think.

I think until I'm exhausted,

until the emotion loses its intensity,

or changes shape,

or hides itself well enough

for me to ignore it.

And then I say:

there.

I understand it now.

But I don't.

I didn't understand it.

I circled around it.

I translated it into something more bearable.

I turned it into a version of itself

that I could hold

without breaking apart.

But it's still there.

Underneath.

Waiting.

Because there are things that cannot be solved by understanding them.

There are things that only begin to change

when you stop analyzing them

and allow yourself

to feel them,

even if you don't know

what to do afterward.

-Rita Caronte

[ritacaronte]

My face might not belong to me.

I know the shape of it. The curve of my mouth, the tiredness beneath my eyes, the expression I wear when someone asks if I'm okay.

I know exactly which version of me to offer.

Soft enough. Funny enough. Interested enough.

Human enough.

And maybe that's what scares me.

How easily it happens.

The way I can adjust without thinking, mirror what is needed, become whatever keeps the room from looking too closely.

People talk about identity like it lives somewhere obvious.

In childhood photographs. In favourite colours. In dreams for the future.

But I have spent years collecting evidence that contradicts itself.

I care too much.

I don't care enough.

I love people fiercely, then disappear into a distance I cannot explain.

I know what pain looks like on other people's faces.

I know what I should say.

Sometimes I even mean it.

Sometimes I don't know if meaning it is supposed to feel different.

I watch everyone else move through the world as if they were born with instructions I misplaced.

As if they know which thoughts belong to them and which ones should frighten them.

Meanwhile,

I catalogue myself like an unsolved case.

This reaction. That absence.

The anger that arrives too quickly.

The guilt that follows behind it, breathless.

The emptiness that opens unexpectedly in moments that should matter more.

I keep asking the same question using different words:

What is wrong with me?

As if there has to be a single answer.

As if people are puzzles solved by finding the missing piece.

Maybe this is all I am:

contradiction.

A girl who learned survival so well that even her reflection became negotiable.

A person capable of tenderness and detachment, kindness and cruelty, devotion and escape.

Someone who keeps waiting to uncover the truth hidden beneath all of this.

The real self.

The original version.

But what if there isn't one?

What if identity isn't buried underneath waiting to be rescued?

What if it is only this:

the choices I make despite the static.

The apologies. The restraint. The moments I stay when leaving would be easier.

The people I protect from parts of me I don't fully understand.

My face might not belong to me.

But these trembling hands do.

This body, still here, does.

This life, however fractured, does.

And maybe tonight

that is enough.

Not certainty.

Not innocence.

Not an explanation that turns me into something easier to forgive.

Just this:

I do not know what happened inside me.

I do not know why I became someone I sometimes fear.

But I am still here.

Still choosing.

Still trying

to become someone

I can recognise

when I finally meet her.

-Rita Caronte

[ritacaronte]

Panic Attack

It starts small.

That is the problem.

If it arrived like a storm, I could prepare.

But it never does.

It begins with a thought that doesn't feel dangerous.

A shift.

A question.

A sudden awareness of my own breathing.

And then—

nothing changes.

Except everything.

The room is still there.

The walls remain where they have always been.

People keep talking.

The world refuses to acknowledge what is happening.

But my body does.

My body knows first.

A tightness I cannot negotiate with.

A pulse that becomes louder than every voice around me.

As if something inside me has received terrible news

and forgotten to tell the rest of me.

I try reason.

I try facts.

I remind myself:

there is no fire,

no disaster,

no visible danger.

But fear is not listening.

Fear has already left the conversation.

Now it is running.

And my body runs with it.

My hands.

My chest.

My throat.

Every part of me preparing to survive something

that isn't here.

That is the strangest part.

The absence.

The way I can look around and find nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

And still feel as though the ground has decided it no longer wants me.

I want to leave.

I want to stay.

I want someone to tell me what is happening.

I want no one to look at me at all.

Contradictions stacking on top of each other until I can barely breathe under their weight.

And then—

slowly,

so slowly it almost feels unfair—

it begins to loosen.

The air returns.

The walls become walls again.

My heart remembers that it belongs inside my chest

and not somewhere far ahead of me.

Nothing is fixed.

Nothing is explained.

The fear leaves without apologizing.

And I remain.

Tired.

Quiet.

Still sitting in the same room.

Looking at the place where the danger never was

and wondering

why it felt so real.

-Rita Caronte

[the-irreverend]

And stay safe everyone!

[ritacaronte]

Gray Between Galaxies

For years I thought desire was something simple, a fire everyone carried in their pockets, something that arrived on time and demanded to be fed. I listened to people speak about attraction as if it were weather, as if storms belonged to everyone, and I searched my own skies wondering why mine stayed quiet for so long. I mistook silence for absence, hesitation for failure, and every unanswered question became another stone in the wall I built around myself.

I watched people fall into each other with the certainty of gravity. A glance, a smile, a touch, and suddenly they were burning. I wanted to understand that language. I wanted to know why entire worlds seemed to begin with a single spark while I stood at the edge of the blaze, feeling warmth but never quite catching fire. There were moments when desire arrived, sudden and undeniable, but it came like a comet crossing a winter sky: beautiful, rare, impossible to summon. By the time I reached for it, it was already becoming memory.

So I spent years believing I was missing something. A piece. A mechanism. A secret instruction everyone else had received. I searched through old loves, old obsessions, old wounds, turning them over like artifacts from a forgotten civilization. I thought the answer would be dramatic, some revelation descending from the heavens with thunder and certainty.

Instead, it arrived quietly.

One word.

Graysexual.

A small word carrying the weight of entire constellations.

And suddenly the ruins became a map.

The silence I had feared was not emptiness. The distance I had mistaken for brokenness was not a flaw. My heart was not a failed version of someone else's. It was simply its own landscape, governed by different seasons, blooming according to laws older and stranger than the ones I had been taught.

I understood then that I was never standing outside desire. I was walking through it differently. My attraction was not a wildfire consuming everything in its path; it was a sacred flame hidden deep within a mountain, waiting for the rare moments when the earth itself chose to open. It was not weaker for being uncommon. If anything, it was more precious because of it.

The world loves certainty. It loves clear categories and simple stories. It wants every heart to beat to the same rhythm, every longing to follow the same script. But I am tired of shrinking myself to fit myths that were never written for me. I am tired of measuring my existence against fires that were never meant to be mine.

I am gray, and gray is not absence.

Gray is the horizon between night and dawn. It is the color of distant galaxies, of ancient stone temples, of storms gathering strength beyond the mountains. It is the place where opposites meet without destroying each other. It is mystery, possibility, and space.

For the first time, I do not look at myself as a question waiting to be answered. I look at myself as a universe finally learning its own name. The stars were always there. The sky was never empty. I simply needed the right darkness to see them.

And now that I can, I have no desire to become anyone else. My story was never missing a chapter.

This was the chapter.

This was the beginning.

-Rita Caronte

[ritacaronte]

An Easier Gate

The night wore your voice like a funeral veil,

and every corridor of my mind echoed with the ghost of your name.

I lit candles for memories that should have stayed buried, watched their trembling flames dance over the bones of what we were.

The walls grew darker. The silence grew teeth.

I prayed to forget you, but grief is a faithful god, and it kept leading me back to your grave inside my chest.

If losing you was written by fate,

then dying felt like an easier gate.

So I wandered through the ruins, half-alive, half-haunting myself,

a shadow kneeling before a love already turned to dust,

waiting for the darkness to be kind enough to close its arms around me too.

-Rita Caronte

[ritacaronte]

Walk away?

Maybe letting you go is the most honest love I have left to give.

Because right now I am still a wounded coyote, carrying old teeth marks beneath my fur, flinching at tenderness, mistaking safety for danger.

And I love you enough to know that love should not always ask someone to stay.

Sometimes it asks you to step back.

To respect the distance.

To stop reaching for a hand when your own is still shaking.

So if I walk away, it isn't because I stopped loving you.

It's because I haven't yet learned how to love you without bleeding on everything I touch.

-Rita Caronte

[minimalistquotes]

The ability to observe without judgment is one of the highest forms of intelligence.

[ritacaronte]

Not Her

The house no longer sleeps.

It creaks. Breathes. Watches me.

Some nights, I swear the walls remember things before I do.

Your voice comes through the outlets, the pipes, the hallway.

Sometimes you whisper my name. Sometimes you repeat the things you used to say:

“Look at me.” “If you loved me, you could.” “You’re exaggerating again.”

And suddenly, I am small.

Not in age. In spirit.

The ceiling pulses above me. It shouldn't. But it does.

Like my chest when I remember your hand around my wrist, too tight to be affection, too familiar to forget.

I try not to think.

Mistake.

Because when my mind goes quiet, the memories come back.

Your room. The orange light. My body saying no in ways that were too soft for someone like you.

Now I see you everywhere.

In reflections. In crowds. In the corner of my eye.

Always walking away. Always making me follow.

The worst part isn't the voices.

It's that sometimes I still miss you.

And then your voice and mine become impossible to separate:

Maybe it wasn't that bad. Maybe you imagined it. Maybe you deserved it.

Last night, I looked into the mirror and for one terrible second, I had your face.

Your smile.

I dropped to the bathroom floor, shaking, whispering:

“I am not her.”

But the house kept creaking.

And somewhere in the hallway,

I could have sworn

someone laughed.

-Rita Caronte

[quotefeeling]

“Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.”

— Sylvia Plath

[ritacaronte]

As if you already knew me

No idea who you are. And yet— you look at me like you’ve already read every page of me. Like you know how my voice sounds when I lie, how my breathing changes when I get nervous, which part of me would break first if you stepped a little closer.

And that… shouldn’t happen.

Because I barely know you. But you— you don’t look at me like that by accident.

And there’s something in the way you hold my gaze that makes me stay a second longer than I should.

I don’t know who you are. But I have this feeling that somehow you already know who I am.

And I don’t know why… but I’m going to see you again.

[ritacaronte]

I think I’m learning that wanting someone doesn’t always feel like certainty.

Sometimes it feels like hesitation. Like standing at the edge of something beautiful and not knowing if I’m ready to fall.

-Rita Caronte