Bleed.

On splintering.

I feel myself splintering beneath the surface—a fracture so quiet only I can hear it.
Not the clean break of bone, but the slow tearing of something never meant to be pulled this thin.

Every time I open my mouth and let the truth soak into the light, it costs me skin.
Hope enters like a promise and leaves like a lesson. Disappointment doesn’t knock—it seeps. It finds the old wounds and presses until they remember how to ache. And I remember how to scream.

I used to think pain was a leak I could patch. That if I filled the gaps with enough noise, enough laughter, enough borrowed bodies, it would seal itself. So I tried.
Easy smiles. Flippant people. Promises offered then taken back just as easily.
Long nights that blurred at the edges. Rooms so loud they swallowed thought whole.
I mistook distraction for healing. Mistook being needed for being loved.

None of it worked. Of course it didn’t.

It didn’t bring back my Dad’s mind. Didn’t sharpen my vision to the people around me wearing masks. Didn’t rewind the years to the place where my world still felt anchored. It didn’t return the small, unguarded version of me. The one who believed that when someone said I’m not going anywhere, it meant forever.

Instead, I learned how to hold onto smoke. How to clutch at things already dissolving in my hands. How to call it strength when it was really fear. Fear of letting go, fear of being left with nothing but myself.

Life feels like a series of rehearsed abandonments. Reassurances offered too easily. Presence promised, then thinned by distance. And still, I believed. Because somewhere inside me is still the child waiting at the doorway, listening for a familiar engine in the driveway, thinking if she is good enough, quiet enough, lovable enough—people will choose not to leave.

And every time they do, something in me opens like it’s the first wound. As if I haven’t learned, this is what hearts do when they are brave enough to keep opening.

Sometimes I wish I had a clock for a heart—something mechanical and obedient. Ticking instead of trembling. Something I could wind tight when it loosens at the sound of footsteps fading. Something that would measure time instead of longing.

Instead, I’m stitched together with a thin red thread. It looks like blood, if you look closely. No one ever looks closely. The stitches loosen slowly.

I bleed into the dark.