Fragments in the Wind

Tonight, I write in the dark, with only the faint glow of this lamp for company. Maybe that’s fitting—confessions like these aren’t meant for sunlight. They belong in shadows, whispered to pages that will never speak back. Because the truth is ugly. And trust—God, trust is so much uglier when it dies.

I used to believe in the sanctity of words. I believed that if I gave them honestly, raw and unpolished, they would be safe. Held. Protected. I thought trust was something sturdy, a bridge built strong enough to carry the weight of all I could not say out loud. I thought people who promised to listen actually meant it.

I was wrong.

The betrayal wasn’t loud. It didn’t come crashing down in some cinematic scene of tears and shouting. No, it was quiet. Subtle. Like watching a slow crack run through glass. The first time I felt it, I almost didn’t notice. A sentence I’d spoken in confidence was repeated carelessly, stripped of context, turned into something foreign. The words weren’t mine anymore. They’d been twisted, reshaped by a tongue that didn’t care enough to hold them gently.

That was when I learned that trust doesn’t always break with a scream. Sometimes, it just… leaks away. Like water dripping through cupped hands. You don’t even realize it’s gone until you look down and see that you’re empty.

Now, I keep my voice low. I’ve stopped lending ears my truths, because the grip I thought I had on connection was never mine to begin with. It was already loosened, slipping silently. And every time I’ve tried to speak, I feel like I’m throwing words into a storm—wild, chaotic, merciless. My words scatter like sand in the wind, lost before anyone even tries to catch them.

I picture them sometimes, those words, tumbling across a lonely beach at night. There’s no one to hear them, no one to pick them up and hold them close. They are just whispers, fading echoes of a heart that once dared to trust. Maybe that’s why I write here instead. At least the paper won’t betray me. At least ink won’t twist my meaning into something I can’t recognize.

I used to crave meaning, to believe life was a grand story I could write myself into. I thought every confession, every risk, would build something greater—an epic tale of love and resilience. I wanted my vulnerability to matter. But people don’t want to hold that weight. They don’t want to see the raw, bleeding truth of another person’s soul. They’d rather forget. They’d rather turn stories into background noise, fleeting memories. My pain became a passing thought, something they brushed off with a shrug. And in their forgetting, I felt erased.

That kind of erasure changes you. It makes you suspicious of kindness, wary of every promise. It teaches you to smile while building walls so high no one can see over them. Because if no one can see you, they can’t hurt you. That’s the theory, anyway. But here’s the part no one talks about: even with the walls, even in silence, the ache doesn’t disappear. It festers in the dark, whispering that maybe you were never worth holding carefully to begin with.

So I write. I bleed myself onto these pages because silence is heavier than any word I could speak. And though I don’t believe anyone will understand—not really—I still try. I write because the alternative is choking on everything I’ve swallowed just to keep the peace.

This isn’t poetry. It isn’t some neat string of metaphors meant to impress. It’s just pain. Raw, unedited. It’s me admitting that trust feels like a foreign concept now, something I can’t quite remember the texture of. It’s me confessing that I am tired of giving pieces of myself away only to watch them get thrown into the wind.

I imagine that beach again, empty under a bruised sky, wind carrying every word I’ve ever spoken far, far away. I imagine myself standing there, alone, the tide creeping up to wash away even the footprints I leave behind. That’s how it feels: to trust, to lose, to be forgotten.

But here’s the thing. I’m still here. Even when it feels like no one cares to understand, I remain. I write, I speak, I breathe, even if every word vanishes like smoke. Maybe no one will read this, maybe no one ever will. That’s okay. This journal doesn’t need an audience. It only needs me.

Because if I don’t tell my own story, no one else will.