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Write me a list of things that don’t suck.

If my name has been crossed out, leave the ink where it bled. Let the scar stay visible. Because if something erased can still be read, then maybe disappearance is just another way of remaining. Write tomorrow beneath it. Not because it’s promised. Not because it will be kinder. Simply because it came anyways. Then I’ll know that crossed-out names are not the same as forgotten ones.

And maybe hope is nothing more than finding room on the list even after you’ve convinced yourself there wasn’t a place left for you.

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I have no one to tell that I am afraid.

And fear eats at my soul. But if there are letters to write there are reasons to live, I pressed my trembling hands into the quiet and pretended it answers back, I gather fragments of breath like broken glass and swallow them whole, hoping something inside me will begin to flicker, but the night lingers in my ribs like an unspoken name, and I am learning how loneliness echoes, how silence can bruise, how even the smallest flicker of hope feels like a betrayal of the dark I have grown used to, yet still I write, still I carve these words into the softest parts of myself, because somewhere between the ink and the ache there must be a pulse that refuses to stop, a fragile, stubborn rhythm insisting that I remain.

I do not want to be wrong inside, not “ill,” not something that must be carried carefully through the day, I want to be boring, I want to be normal, to wake into a morning that does not already know my name, where light falls in quietly and coffee cools without urgency, where nothing in me is asking to be something, I am tired of a mind that circles itself like a drain, tired of feelings that arrive too loud and stay too long, I want hours that pass like soft rain against a window no one opens, I want to forget myself in small, unremarkable things—shoes by the door, keys in the wrong pocket, I want the low, ordinary hum of being alive without commentary. I do not want depth if it means drowning, I do not want to be seen if it means being held together by effort, let me be forgettable in the gentlest way, a life without edges, without echoes, without this constant returning to myself, I do not want to be “ill,” I just want to be boring, I just want to be normal, because somewhere in that quiet, unremarkable rhythm, there must be a way to finally belong.

You whisper rules into my bones— again, again, again—

the way poison sometimes tastes sweet on a split tongue, like rot disguised as sugar. Still the same kid—hands trembling over borders no one else can see, counting, recounting, grinding the same raw circles into the dark until my thoughts bleed quiet. Still the same kid, begging the silence not to break its teeth on me. Without me, you’re weak, you say, still the same kid. But I know what you are. A hollow voice hiding in my ribs. You cling to me because emptiness needs a body. You say you drive me, you say you give my life meaning, you say you’re my soul— but souls don’t beg this hard to stay alive.

And yet I am still the same kid.

I tell someone I miss being sick,

and they look at me like I’ve spoken a strange language. Why would anyone miss the cold, they ask. But they do not know the quiet that lived there, the way the world softened when my body finally had permission to stop.

Did the moment of my dying truly strike you with such fascination and violence that you could not let it remain, that you reached into whatever silence I had fallen into and pulled me back from it, and if that is true I can only hope the weight of the cost did not hollow you out, because to return from that edge carrying breath again must mean that somewhere you believed my fragile, stubborn life was still worth the trouble.

The first time I cut into myself

I was in the sixth grade, using the broken metal rim at the end of a pencil. It wasn’t a blade, just a small torn circle of metal that caught the skin when I pressed hard enough.

I remember the desk, the dull classroom light, the quiet way pain could be made small and secret.

It was the first time I discovered something dangerous and comforting at once— that my anger did not have to spill outward, it did not need to stain. That it could turn inward like a locked room where only I could hear it breathe.

Constantly I stop and question the shape of my own voice,

asking quietly if this anger belongs to me or if it echoes from my mother’s mouth, wondering whether the heat inside my chest is meant to build something or simply burn, and somewhere in that pause I imagine the younger version of myself standing small and silent in the doorway, and I ask if the sound of me would make them feel safe, or if they would learn fear from the way my hands move and the way my words fall.

The endless courtroom inside the mind

where every thought is dragged forward as evidence against you, where a single image appears and suddenly it grows claws, grows teeth, grows a voice that whispers what if this is you, what if this thought is the truth, and then the interrogation begins again, digging through memory like a detective searching for a crime that might not exist, replaying every word you have said, every feeling you have felt, every flicker of emotion under a microscope so bright it burns, hoping somewhere in the ruins there is proof you are not the person the thought claims you are, but the mind does not stop, it circles back again and again, asking the same question in a thousand shapes until even your own intentions feel suspicious, until you stand inside yourself like a stranger in a house that used to belong to you, checking every room, every drawer, every cornered piece of soul, and still the voice says look again, you missed something, you always miss something, while outside the world continues its gentle ordinary breathing and inside your skull the sirens keep screaming, because the most terrifying prison is the one built from your own thoughts, where the guard, the judge, and the accused are all the same trembling person trying desperately to prove their innocence.

I have felt like a bad person since I was nine years old. So I got drunk, stoned and cut open, and hoped someday they would forgive me for being so angry.

I would be kind for you,

softening the sharp edges of my tongue, disciplining my hands the patience they never learned, because love, when it looks like you, makes even a storm ashamed of its thunder. I would fight my biting, violent nature for you, wrestling the wolves that pace inside my ribs, holding their teeth between my hands until they remember how to rest. For you, I would practice gentleness like a prayer spoken by someone who was never taught to pray. And when I fail— when anger rises like a bruise beneath the skin— I bow my head to the quiet truth of you, ashamed that I am still unfinished, ashamed that the world carved its roughness into me before I ever learned your name. Perhaps that is the illness in me: to long, sometimes, to be broken enough —not knowing that the wish for sickness is already a quiet fever of the soul.

Yet I am still trying, trying to become the version of myself that your kindness already believes I am.

He places his keys in my open palm,

metal still warm from his hand, and looks at me— not casually, but deep, steady, unguarded. “I trust you to take care of them.” As if he isn’t only talking about keys. As if trust is something heavier, something you don’t just hand over unless you mean it. The shift moves on like it always does— But there’s a thin thread of ending woven through the ordinary. Later, I tell him quietly, “I know I won’t see you again.” I say it like a fact, like the sky saying it will be dark soon. Not dramatic. Just true. He laughs— that crooked, almost wounded laugh— and shakes his head.

“God, I hate you for knowing me so well.”

And then he pulls me into a hug— not the quick kind, not the polite kind, but the kind that presses memory into bone. His chin against my shoulder, my arms around him, tighter than I meant, longer than I wanted to. Like I could anchor something that has already decided to leave. Thursday wasn’t supposed to be goodbye. Monday is still written on the schedule. But some endings don’t wait for the calendar to catch up. Some people don’t stay for the last shift. Not because they don’t care— but because caring costs something. He trusted me with his keys. Maybe because he knew I’d understand when he couldn’t stay. Some people don’t say farewell. They just hand you something small, look you in the eyes, and let you be the one who knows.

“Sadness does not need to eat at your table”

but it has memorized my address, the way the floorboards sigh at midnight. it does not knock, it slips in with the evening air and sits where the light is weakest, and sometimes it clears its throat, soft at first, a careful little sound like a spoon against porcelain. i hear it, of course i hear it. The way my chest tightens as if bracing for a name i do not want called, but i busy myself, i rinse plates that are already clean, i scroll through other people’s laughter, i turn the music up just enough to blur the edges of its voice. It clears its throat again, a little louder now, not angry, just waiting. I pretend not to notice because if i look up, if our eyes meet across the table, i am afraid it will ask for honesty, and honesty is a door i have nailed shut, so i let the chair creak in silence, i let the sound hover between us unanswered, but sadness does not shout, it does not flip the table or break the glass, it simply waits, clearing its throat again and again until the noise i have built around myself is louder than my own heart, and somewhere beneath it all there is a small, steady knowing that one day i will have to stop pretending i did not hear it.

“They say I’m alone because I find everyone irritating.”

They say it like it’s a punchline, like I woke up one morning and chose solitude the way you choose a jacket—careless, seasonal, easy to take off. They say I’m alone because I roll my eyes, my silence being as sharp as my words can be, because I don’t laugh at jokes that scrape against my ribs. What they call “annoyed” is the bruise no one asked about. It’s the flinch when voices get too loud, the way my skin tightens in rooms full of unfinished sentences and half-hearted empathy. I don’t find everyone irritating. I find the pretending exhausting—the way people speak without meaning it, the way they touch without staying, the way they promise without knowing what it costs. Every careless word lands like gravel in my mouth. Every shallow connection is a hand reaching but never gripping. They see the irritation. They don’t see the depth—the ache that lives beneath the skin, where disappointment ferments into something that looks like anger but tastes like longing. They say I’m alone because everyone irritates me. They never ask what hurt me first.

He notices the way I worry my necklace.

The medallion spins between my fingers, polished by years of quiet panic — a small, obedient orbit of comfort. He sits beside me. Close enough for the air to shift. Close enough for my body to mistake proximity for gravity. He takes it gently, but not gently enough. Smoke clings to him — burnt endings, wintered breath, the soft brutality of a cigarette dying in solitude. His thumb moves over the metal, slow, repeating, like tracing a scar he has no right to know. As if he understands this is not an object but a pulse. That it sleeps against my chest when the world grows teeth. I look up. He is already there. The medallion returns to my palm — warmer than before, strange now, carrying the echo of his touch. His eyes linger even after he stand. When he leaves, the silence expands — heavier than when it was only ever mine.

I had a conversation with my best friend the other day.

He was cleaning his room, lifting old cups, folded clothes, things that could still be put back where they belonged. I sat on the floor by the door, small, like someone waiting to be allowed in. I told him the other day: I don’t compare myself anymore. That I killed that instinct years ago. That I don’t want to matter to the universe, don’t need to leave a dent in time, don’t need the sky to remember my name. I said it calmly. Like it was settled. He didn’t look at me now, dragging it, when he suddenly said I don’t think that’s true. He said, maybe I believe it. Maybe I rehearsed it long enough that it sounds like freedom. But freedom doesn’t appear just because you stop talking about the cage— He said it isn’t my fault. And somehow that hurt more. He said it was put in me. Layer by layer. By parents who praised my sister like a trophy held too high,— while I learned to survive on leftovers, on glances, on being almost enough. By mirrors that never agreed with me, by strangers who felt entitled to my existence and body. So I learned to want two impossible things: to be the best and to be the worst. To win and to suffer more beautifully than anyone else. Like if I hurt hard enough, someone would finally stop me. Finally choose me. I keep tearing the same wound open, not to heal, but to prove it’s real. Pressing fingers into it, waiting for a judge, a witness, a sentence that says: this damage counts. But there is no trial. No closing statement. No redemption arc. Just me on the floor by the door, watching him clean his life into order, while I sit with something unfixable rotting quietly inside my chest, realizing that maybe I never stopped comparing—

I just learned how to call it something else.

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