Love, HER

She had been carrying her sadness for so long that it no longer felt like grief, but inheritance—as though it had been sewn into her bones before she was ever born. She never named it aloud. To speak it would make it real, and reality had always been cruel enough without invitation. In every place she had once called home, there lingered whispers of her impermanence, as if even the walls understood she was only passing through. Home, to her, had never been a place, only a ruin she kept trying to rebuild with trembling hands. She had worn many lives like borrowed coats, shedding them at every threshold in the hope that reinvention might save her from herself. But no matter how far she wandered, the self remained—a faithful ghost, waiting in every mirror.

Poetry was never meant to be hers, or so she believed. Not because she did not feel deeply enough, but because she felt too much and lacked the grace to contain it. She knew the poets before her—their brilliance, their precision, their ache made beautiful—and beside them, her own words felt unruly, almost violent. She did not write delicately. She wrote like breaking glass, like storms against cathedral windows. Her verses were crowded with boys, with longing, with the unbearable mechanics of being alive. Pain was the marrow of her craft; without it, her art grew pale and hollow, like flowers pressed too long between pages.

And sometimes she wondered if there was something terribly misshapen in her spirit for that—something cruel in the way suffering fed her, something fragile in the way she could not survive without it. Too merciless to rest, too tender to disappear.

Death had always been a peculiar companion to her—not feared, only understood. In rooms where others spoke of it with caution, she felt strangely awake, almost luminous. Somewhere in the quiet chambers of her mind, she had long accepted a private prophecy: that nineteen would be the furthest shore she’d ever reach. She never confessed it. Some thoughts are too sacred, too damning, to survive the light of day.

What frightened her more than dying, perhaps, was living the way the world demanded. The thought of labor, of clocks, of becoming another obedient body in the machinery of survival—it hollowed her. Not because she lacked ambition, but because her ambition was too strange for the world to honor. She dreamed, fiercely, of living—but living, to her, was not the ordinary business of existing. It was escape. Release. A freedom so complete it resembled death.

And so, when asked what she wanted to become, she performed. She played doctor, lawyer, accountant, pilot—parading futures like costumes for an audience that only understood practical dreams. But beneath the theatre was a wound that never healed: the bitter knowing that her truest longing would always be dismissed as foolishness, or weakness, or madness.

And perhaps that was the cruelest thing of all—that the world could forgive you for wanting to save everyone else, but never for wanting, desperately, to save yourself.