Empty Hands
They come to me when their night gets cold.
Spilling out stories that their own chests can’t seem to hold.
And I just sit there. Listening.
Patching up their fractures, mending their pain,
while my own world keeps drowning in the exact same rain.
Everybody leans.
Everybody leans the second they start to break,
looking at me like I’m the bedrock, like I’m the ground that could never shake.
But nobody stops to ask what it costs to stay.
Nobody counts the price of carrying storms... that were never mine to save.
Because I am tired.
I am so tired of being everybody’s medicine,
when I can’t even heal the wreckage that I am standing in.
They pour their chaos, their venom, their grief into these empty hands,
and then they walk away, leaving me bleeding right where I stand.
I am holding up entire worlds that were never mine to bear.
Losing pieces of myself just trying to decode their signs, trying to care.
They call me "strong."
But "strong" is just the word they use so they don’t have to see
that this weight is slowly, quietly... burying me.
I got so good at camouflaging my own cracks.
Always giving pieces of me away, never asking for a single thing back.
Playing the healer. Playing the guide. Playing the saint.
While my own demons grow well-fed on the inside.
"You’re the only one who understands," they say.
So I lock my jaw, I swallow my breath, and I stay.
But understanding doesn’t make me whole.
It just drills deeper holes inside my own soul.
And then... the room goes quiet.
When the noise fades out and everybody is gone.
I am left alone with the weight of all their shadows...
and absolutely nowhere to put them down.
Just me. Everybody medicine.
With empty hands, a crowded mind,
and a weight that is slowly... burying me.
