You learn to carry yourself like a question no one dares ask. You learn that desire will hollow you out and still demand rent. That love, when offered too freely, becomes a feast for those who never learned portioning. That even the purest intimacy can sour into expectation, withdrawal, disconnection.

You have written poetry out of your own damnation; painted masterpieces from your leaking wounds. You are the aftermath of everything that didn’t kill you. The silence after the last note of a symphony—echoing, eternal, proof that something beautiful just occurred.

To bleed into the earth and rise as fruit.

The years you made yourself easier to love by shrinking. You told yourself it was grace, but it was starvation. Emotional anorexia in a world that labels people strong for never asking to be fed.

And memory, oh, memory is a liar with perfect teeth. It comes back kinder than the truth. Or crueler. But never accurate.