You’re doing the thing again.
My throat closes. Another message arrives before I can even process the first.
The bath. The quiet. The pretending you’re calm because everything is arranged.
I set the phone down on the edge of the tub as if the glass might burn my skin. My reflection in the mirror looks less certain now. The smile is gone. My eyes are too bright, my pupils blown wide as if I’m bracing for an impact I can’t see coming.
The phone buzzes again.
You think tonight was a performance. An act. Something you put on to survive them.
The water feels suddenly cooler. Or perhaps the chill is internal.
But you didn’t act when you stood in the room. You didn’t act when you didn’t look back. And you didn’t act when you smiled.
I hug my knees to my chest, the milk-water rippling around me. Stop, I think, the word a silent scream. You don’t get to narrate me.
The phone doesn’t care.
Here’s the part you’re avoiding: You weren’t confused then. You’re confused now.
My breath stutters.
Because confusion comes after freedom. Not before it.
The candle nearest the tub flickers, the flame bending low as if someone just exhaled over it, then righting itself.
You don’t know what to do without the threat anymore. Without someone telling you who you are by what they take from you.
My chest aches. My hands are trembling beneath the surface of the water.
So you’re trying to make this normal. Clean. Contained. You always do that after you choose yourself. You clean. You soak. You pretend the quiet means peace.
Tears blur my vision before I even realise I’m crying. They slide down my temples and disappear into the bath, swallowed without a trace.
It doesn’t. It means the noise hasn’t decided how to speak yet.
I press my fingers to my lips, holding myself perfectly still, feeling the tremor run through my marrow despite everything I told myself outside that locked door. I’m fine, I want to type. I don’t.
The last message arrives.
You didn’t fracture tonight. You revealed where the cracks already were.
The phone goes dark.
The bathroom hums. The candles burn. Everything is exactly where I put it. And for the first time since I walked out of that room, I let myself admit the cold truth curling in my gut.
The smile wasn’t an act. The act is this. The calm. The bath. The pretending I’m not standing on the edge of a precipice that doesn’t care which name I give it. I sink lower into the water, the milk closing over my shoulders, over my mouth, until the world dulls.
Normal was never the goal. I just forgot how loud freedom is when no one’s telling you what it looks like.
I slide under the water. Just for a second. Long enough for the world to blur into a muffled, distant hum. When I surface, my breath tearing out of me, the bathroom feels thinner. Like the present can’t quite hold the weight of the past.
The milk bath ripples. And the memory slips in.
I’m fourteen again.
I’m smaller, folded in on myself on a plastic chair bolted to the floor. My bare feet are flat against linoleum that smells of bleach and old, stale fear. The walls are a shade of pale greenthat someone once decided would calm children who screamed too much.
