I could feel him behind me the entire time, listening in that way he always did, like he was trying to grab hold of every word before it slipped too far away from him. Trying to force meaning into it. Trying to understand it in a way that still left room for me to come back from it somehow. I don’t know why I kept talking. Maybe I knew the second I stopped thinking about it, the whole thing would hit me properly.
Or maybe I was just sick of hearing people turn ugly things into something easier to stomach. I wanted him to hear it exactly the way it lived inside me. Untouched. Unedited. Exactly as fucking wrong as it actually was.
“You ever notice,”I said, my voice lower now, uneven in a different way,“how some people just… don’t belong anywhere?”
I didn’t wait for an answer.
“You can move them around, put them in different places, different rooms, different lives, doesn’t matter. It’s the same every time. They don’t settle, because they don’t belong.”
My fingers loosened slightly, then tightened again.
“I think I was like that from the start.”The second I said it out loud, it felt stupidly obvious. Like the thought had been sittinginside me the entire time, waiting for me to finally stop avoiding it.
“There’s something wrong with me,”I added. There was nothing uncertain left in it anymore. I was just saying it for what it was.
“And she saw it. She looked at me and saw something she couldn’t live with,”
I continued, my gaze drifting again, not landing anywhere, just moving without purpose.“And I,”I exhaled through my nose again, a short and broken excuse for a breath.
“I don’t even think she was wrong for that.”
There was a pause full of things I didn’t say.
“You ever tried to sit with yourself for too long?”I muttered, almost to myself now.“No distractions, just you.”I let out a small breath.
“It doesn’t take long before it gets… ugly.”I pressed my lips together for a second.“I used to think it would get quieter at some point,”I admitted.
“That if I just… held it together long enough, did everything right, stayed in control…”
I shook my head once.
“Stupid.”
Because it just fucking builds. It always builds.
“And then there are moments,”I went on, slower now, like I was choosing whether to say it or not and deciding to anyway,“where it just… tips.”
My chest rose, held, dropped.
“And not in a ‘I’m sad’ way,”I added, almost annoyed at the thought.“It’s not even about that. More like… what’s the point of dragging it out?”
That sat there deep in the pit of my chest, uncomfortable, but true, honest.
“You wake up, you move through it, you exist in it and for what?”My voice dipped.
“To end up in the exact same place again the next day? I get why she did it.”I said it again, because it didn’t feel like enough the first time.
“She just… stopped participating.”That was the closest I could get to it.
“There’s something almost peaceful about that idea,”I admitted and there was something off about the way I said it.
“Just… deciding you’re done.”
My fingers stilled completely now. No movement, nothing to distract me from it.
“Not having to fight your own head every second.”That was the part that hooked, that stayed with me deep enough that I could feel it in my core.
Little Ghost… if you were sitting in front of me right now, really sitting here, close enough that I could see your eyes properly, close enough that you could feel my breath on your skin, I’d ask you something. And you wouldn’t lie to me. Have you ever felt that? Not the pain, just… exhaustion so deep it makes everything else feel pointless. Because if you have, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t… you will. Eventually.
