I Wasn’t Built for Quiet Lives

I Wasn’t Built for Quiet Lives

I was never good at neat endings,

or lives that fit into polite conversations,

my heart has always leaned toward damage,

toward the places people avoid naming.

I don’t miss people the way others do,

I miss versions of myself that died with them,

parts that stopped breathing quietly,

without anyone calling it a loss.

There are days I feel stitched together wrong,

like something essential was rushed,

like love entered my life without instructions,

and left me holding the consequences.

I have survived on instinct more than hope,

on momentum rather than belief,

moving forward because stopping

would mean looking too closely.

Some wounds don’t ask to be healed,

they ask to be understood,

to be allowed to exist without apology,

without being wrapped in comfort.

I am not broken in a dramatic way,

I am broken in the everyday sense,

the kind that still gets up and functions,

while living in the past