Pillars

When I look back, I don’t see memories.

I see pillars—

huge, ancient, unmovable—

a graveyard rising out of my past,

each one tall enough to spread my chest,

like walking a tightrope of life itself,

each one daring me to keep going.

This isn’t nostalgia.

It’s survival standing upright.

Every pillar is a version of me

that didn’t make it out whole.

The little girl who was happy is there,

buried deep in stone,

her laughter sealed inside

like it learned too early

that joy makes a person a target.

Closer stands the girl who got lost—

the one who learned how to read a room

the way prey reads wind,

how to brace before the blow ever landed,

how to become smaller

so the world wouldn’t feel so threatened by her softness.

They mistook gentleness for permission.

They mistook an open heart for something breakable.

Somewhere between then and now

I stopped knowing what I was,

only what I was allowed to be—

a reflection shaped by other people’s cruelty,

learning my outline from the places I was hit.

I rebelled against all of it,

set out to defy society,

mistaking opposition for freedom

because at least resistance felt like choice.

The pain doesn’t feel old.

It feels preserved.

The joyful days feel imagined,

like a life I once studied

but never got to live.

My heart aches with the grief

of losing people so completely

that even their voices are fading in memories—

absence pressing where love once breathed.

Time doesn’t heal.

Time stacks wreckage neatly

and calls it the past.

The clock keeps watch.

Tick.

Tik clickety clock.

Ding dong.

Cuckoo too.

I mouth the tune rocking back and forth.

A tune I don’t remember learning.

All while I unravel.

My finger taps the table—

tap tap rhythm and tap—

counting seconds like exits,

as if rhythm alone might keep me

from folding inward.

Cold December morning.

Cold, depressed heart.

Gray light crawls through the windows

and settles behind my ribs

like it plans to stay.

God—

what did I let happen to me?

I want to rewind.

I want to stand guard over the little girl

before survival became personality,

before pain taught my body

that hurting itself was quieter

than asking for help.

I want to stop her

from becoming the monster in the mirror—

eyes too old,

smile rehearsed,

wearing my face like evidence

that endurance can rot into rage.

God, I scream Your name.

Help me.

Help her.

She’s still me.

I’m still her.

For one impossible second,

time stands still.

Then the earth keeps spinning anyway,

like shattering collapse doesn’t qualify as an emergency.

A bitter, metallic taste floods my mouth—

the body remembering first—

because this is not how it was supposed to go,

and no philosophy ever convinced blood otherwise.

Some days it wasn’t death I wanted—

just an end to holding myself together,

a silence deep enough

to stop the war inside my head.

My thoughts begin to spiral.

Pillars tilt.

Stone cracks,

like scars the body learned to hide

in plain sight.

Dust fills my lungs.

I tell you—

I’m mad as a hatter,

laughing where fear should be,

grinning because chaos feels safer

than hope that keeps breaking promises.

Here’s the truth no one warns you about—

the self is a series of compromises made under pressure.

I, doomed to become many,

so at least one of us,

I thought,

might survive the carnage.

And beneath all of it—

beneath the wreckage and the rage and the scars—

there was always this:

Love was never my weakness.

It didn’t make me fragile.

The thing that kept surviving me.

Making me impossible to erase.

Out of nowhere God speaks,

in the trenches of a broken life,

spiraling in addiction and self-hate—

BE STILL!

Are you done?

Firmly.

Commanding with mercy.

Stopping everything.

No ticking.

No tapping.

No pillars rumbling.

Quiet.

Dense.

Real.

Call it madness if you need to.

I didn’t go looking for God.

I was interrupted.

Something spoke—

and the chaos listened.

The noise obeyed.

I feel it.

I don’t have to run anymore.

I’m still here.

There’s breath moving through my lungs.

I am safe.