this is what it’s like to carry too many versions of one life inside one body — and still try to make sense of love, of hurt, of who i am beneath it all.

borrowed. some mornings, i wake up and borrow a personality from the pile beside my bed. none of them ever quite fit – some pinch at the chest, others sag in the spine – but i wear them anyway. even joy feels borrowed, like slipping into someone else’s coat: warm, but never mine to keep.

pen in hand. i don’t write to hurt. i write because i am hurt, because pain has to go somewhere. because if i don’t let it bleed into the page, it settles in my body, makes a home in my chest. sometimes i write just to figure out who’s still in there. which version of me is holding the pen. which self managed to survive the day.

scars offered. i offered myself to you. opened the door to my past, peeled off the band-aids, showed you where it hurt. not to make you stay, but to free you from whatever was holding you back. i handed you my vulnerability like it might save us both. and still — you burned me.

resignation. your war isn’t mine to fight. i was once your soldier. i bore the weight of your wounds, let them shape me. but i won’t be your prison. not anymore.

wreckage. and here’s the part that won’t leave me alone: if someone like you — so small, so careless with what’s fragile — could split me open like this, imagine what someone with more could do. more heart. more presence. more me in them. it would wreck me in ways i can’t even name. maybe i was never meant to stay whole. maybe i was meant to be broken open, not by the wrong hands, but by the right ones, to find what’s real inside. and i think… i’d let it.