The Ink Chapel

There are days I wake up and feel like a battlefield no one stayed to clean,
memories scattered like shell casings, trust buried somewhere beneath the smoke.
I’ve been abandoned so quietly it echoed. People leave in pieces, and somehow I’m always the one left holding the blueprint of what we almost were. I’ve stood in rooms where love used to live, now empty, save for the sound of me pretending it doesn’t hurt. I’ve smiled through verdicts, swallowed grief like broken glass, and made homes in places where I was only ever tolerated. I am not soft because I was spared; I am soft because I survived the hard things without turning into them. Maybe that’s the saddest part- how I still find beauty in the wreckage, still offer warmth with hands that were taught to flinch, still stay gentle in a world that keeps trying to make me cruel. 

© The Ink Chapel. Don’t steal my trauma. thanks.