18 years, 18 Tradgies. Part 1

Eighteen winters, eighteen wakes, each year a candle burned and broke, melting into something I no longer knew — a self built from shards of what others took. They called it living. I called it surviving in silence, where panic was the language of my body, and breathing felt like begging for mercy. I learned early how words could bruise — “I wish you were dead,” a sentence heavy as a tombstone, spoken by the man who should’ve been home. And when another voice, softer but crueler, whispered, “You’ll never find love,” it stitched itself into my skin like a curse I couldn’t peel away. I was touched where no one should be, turned into a thing to be used, and afterward — emptiness, the kind that hums beneath your ribs until even your tears stop believing in you. Sometimes the world blurred for hours, sometimes for days. Panic stole my tongue, my legs, made me a statue of trembling flesh — I was still breathing, but only out of habit. They saw me smile, but they didn’t see the quiet funerals I held for every version of me that couldn’t go on. No one noticed the little deaths — the moment laughter became a lie, the way I flinched at kindness, the way love began to sound like a trap. (1/2)