why are you doing this

because it needs to bleed out of me.

because when grief piles so thick,
every memory cuts into the next,
there’s nowhere else to go.

i’ve tried therapy—
the quiet rooms,
the worksheets,
the sympathetic nods
from people who never lived
a moment of what broke me.

i’ve tried friends,
family,
tried my mother,
tried silence,
screaming,
journals,
holding it in,
letting it out—
everything.

but i've echoed into silence my entire life.

they understand a piece—
the heartbreak,
the violence,
the loneliness—
but never all of it,
never the layered grief
that stacks so high you can’t breathe.

so i learned to drown quietly,
holding pain i couldn’t share,
carrying weight
that should’ve killed me.

and now i have a daughter.

and if i don’t get this pain out of my body,
it will eat me alive.
it will rot me from the inside.
and it will leak.
onto her.

onto her soft, new life.
and i won’t let that happen.

so i write—
because it’s the only way the pain leaves
that doesn’t feel like punishment.

you wonder why i write about love—
why i write about loss.
because even losing love,
the deepest grief i’ve known,
is still not the ugliest.

the ugliest parts stay quiet.
they slip out sideways,
hidden in safer stories.
the truly brutal things
are whispered between lines,
because there’s still no one
who can hold the weight.

so i’m left alone
with a baby and a dog who can’t talk,
friends scattered,
family erased,
holding grief that has nowhere else to go.

i’m grateful for this quiet life.
grateful to have survived.
but gratitude doesn’t erase trauma,
doesn’t soften loneliness,
doesn’t dissolve pain.

why do i write?

because when no one’s there to listen,
this page is all that’s left.

because if i don’t write,
i feel like i won’t survive it.

because the truth needs somewhere to go
to remind me it all happened,
to remind me i’m still here—
still breathing,
still alive.