I want to go where the quiet is thick,
to a cave built from my own ribs,
to fold like a seed into soil,
to curl into the low hum of my bones
and sleep until the world forgets how loud it is.
There is a tiredness in me that is not just fatigue.
It is a slow, salt-thin erosion,
the soft grinding of expectations unmet,
the steady weather of having given more than was returned.
I held out my hands like lamps;
I bore the light for both of us.
I believed that steadiness would teach someone else to stay.
I believed my loyalty was currency that would buy devotion.
Now I am learning how often loyalty is a loan that never gets repaid.
Sometimes I think about vanishing the way animals hibernate,
not to punish, not to run, but to gather the broken pieces,
to let the body do the work of mending without apology.
To close my eyes and let the cold teach me slow repair.
No calls, no explanations, no friendly messages typed and deleted,
only the slow drip of self-care like sap rising,
only the quiet work of reknitting marrow to marrow.
I am tired of the ledger in my head,
timestamps of small betrayals, receipts of the nights I stayed awake,
the list of ways I rearranged myself to fit someone else’s absence.
I hold grief like a fist full of small stones: sometimes I throw them away,
and sometimes I clutch them because they are the weight I know.
I want to drop them all at once and walk barefoot into a field that has never known my footprints.
I am learning, awkwardly, with stupid stubbornness,
that to unlove is not an action I can command.
My heart refuses the neat cuts I ask it to make.
Love does not always obey the logic of decisions.
It is a stubborn vine that keeps the shape of someone’s name in its coils.
I can scrub the house of their voice; I can change my routines;
I can file the photographs away; I can build new rituals,
and still, the memory of them will bloom in my chest like late flowers.
But love held and pain kept are different things.
I can keep loving the ghost of who they were to me,
while also refusing to let the hurt live at the same address.
I can leave the love on a small shelf, dust it like an antique,
admire its awkward beauty, and refuse to let pain be my roommate.
There is a patient, bracing alchemy in that separation:
honouring what was real without letting it rot the floorboards of my present.
Tonight my throat is heavy with questions I cannot answer:
Why did I believe the promises? Why did I think being steady was enough?
Sometimes the simplest truth is the one that breaks the slowest:
people arrive with pockets and leave with the same hands.
Some cannot carry what you built; some won’t learn the language of reciprocity.
That does not mean your building was a mistake.
It means the blueprint was your lesson, not your sentence.
So I will give myself permission to grieve, fully, loudly, without shame.
Permission to break crockery over the singing of the radio,
permission to cry until the pillow is a map of my face.
Grief is not a defect; it is the evidence of love’s depth.
To feel it is to testify that I felt something true, even if true was not returned in kind.
And while I grieve, I will also practice small mercies for myself:
I will let the mornings stretch longer, pour coffee like an offering,
I will wear shawls that smell like my own skin, make soups that remember childhood.
I will shut windows on old songs that made me small.
I will put my phone on a shelf and let silence be a friend instead of an enemy.
I will plant one stern promise: that I will not barter my joy for another’s presence.
No more shrinking, no more editing sentences so people will like my outline.
No more apologising for how loud my silence is, for how soft my hurt becomes.
I will keep the parts of me that flourish in sunlight; I will not hand them to those who live in shadow.
This is also a time to inventory the lessons sewn between the stitches:
I learned how much of me was giving out of fear, out of the habit of proving worth.
I learned the shape of my boundaries when I finally named them aloud.
I learned that steadiness is a skill I can offer without handing over my house keys.
I learned that asking for care is not a weakness but a map.
I learned that miracles are sometimes the small, steady acts done in private,
showing up for appointments, writing the hard text, turning off a call when it asks too much.
Sometimes, alone in the quiet, I rehearse the future like a promise:
I will open my hands and let the pain fall through my fingers like ash.
I will keep the lessons, those small, stubborn tools, packed gently in my bag.
I will set out again, not because I have healed all at once, but because I have learned to carry less.
I will choose better climates for my heart. I will sit in rooms where eyes do not flinch away.
I will stay for people who can hold the simple weight of me being alive.
When the longing hits, the ache of missing someone I let go of, I will meet it softly.
I will place a candle on the sill and read the list of what I lost and what I found.
I will whisper thank you to the parts that kept me brave, to the small choices that kept me human.
I will forgive the version of me that thought staying meant survival;
I will accept the tender truth that leaving was sometimes the cleanest act of love I could do, for both of us.
There will be mornings I still wake with that hollow ache,
but the hollow will begin to change shape.
It will become a vessel I can feed with new rituals, slow breakfasts, studio time, a call to a friend who makes me laugh until my jaw aches.
The hollow will become the place where I tuck new seedlings: better boundaries, clearer asks, a catalog of my own small victories.
Freedom is not a single moment. It is a curriculum.
It teaches in inches: the space between text message responses, the breath before answering, the extra minute before I let panic choose for me.
Peace arrives in the ordinary: a walk that is not a flight, a laugh that is not a mask, a night where sleep does not require numbing.
Relaxation becomes possible when I lay down the armor of expectation and accept that being gentle with myself is radical.
You may not stop loving them today, and that is okay.
Love is a river that sometimes runs slow and deep.
You can stand on its bank and watch it pass without diving back in.
You can collect the lessons like stones and build a cairn for your future self to follow.
You can promise, aloud, to stay with you.
So rest. Hunker down if you must. Hibernate with dignity.
Do not let anyone confuse your need for retreat with cowardice.
This is brave work, this turning inward, this brave harvesting of pain, this careful unburdening.
When you are ready, no rush, no dates, you will reemerge.
Not the same, not less, only truer: truer to your body, truer to what sustains you, truer to the quiet covenant you made with your own heart.
And when you step back into the sun, carry only what you learned:
the tenderness, the wisdom, the maps, the new rules for who you allow in.
Carry love as an ornament, not a leash. Carry memory as a poem you can recite without bleeding.
Tonight, rest your head. Tell the heart that it is allowed to be small and raw and healing.
Tell the soul that slow is holy. Tell the wound that you will tend it, but you will not let it live in your home.
I am not gone. I am gathering. I will return with hands full of myself.
I Will Return With Myself.
