i understood the arguments people made for it. resentment was bad for you. forgiveness was a gift you gave yourself. releasing anger meant taking your life back from the people who had hurt you. i understood all of it intellectually. i just couldn’t seem to get there.

eventually, my therapist asked me a question.

“do you think you’re trying to forgive someone who is waiting for your forgiveness? because from the way you talk about it, it seems like you’re in a hurry to get there.”

i had to think about that for a moment.

“no”, i told her. the person i was trying to forgive wasn’t waiting for my forgiveness. if anything, he was still doing the things that made forgiveness feel impossible. he continued to be cruel to me, blamed me for things that weren’t mine to carry, and found ways to hurt the people who were still in his life. there had been no apology, no real acknowledgment of what had happened, no indication that he had spent any time considering the damage he had caused. i didn’t even think he believed he had done anything wrong. as far as i could tell, he had no interest in making things right. he was still the same person, behaving in much the same way.

“then where do you think you learned that you have to forgive?” she asked.

i answered almost immediately.

“because you have to”

I said it as if it were a fact, something so obvious it hardly needed explaining. then she asked me to think about where i had learned it. when had i first been told that forgiveness was necessary? who had taught me that it was the right thing to do, that it was something i should strive for regardless of what had happened or whether the person who hurt me had ever taken responsibility?

i laughed a little when i answered, because the first thing that came to mind was catholicism.

i was never particularly religious. i went to church for the occasional special occasion, grew up around people who were more familiar with their faith than i was, and spent afternoons at my abuelita’s house hearing the kinds of things that become part of your understanding of the world before you are old enough to examine them. i didn’t think much about religion as a child. i knew some prayers by heart, though. i knew the words, the rhythm, when to repeat them. i could recite things i didn’t fully understand, and i carried them with me long after i had stopped thinking about where they came from.

por mi culpa, por mi culpa, por mi gran culpa.

i knew those words before i knew how to question them.

i remembered the language of sin, confession, repentance, and absolution. the idea that we must examine ourselves, acknowledge our faults, ask for forgiveness, and spend our lives trying to become better than we were. i don’t think i understood any of this consciously as a child, and i don’t think i can attribute all my beliefs about forgiveness to religion. but i wonder how much of that language stayed with me anyway. how much of it settled somewhere in my mind before i had the words to recognize it.

por mi culpa. my fault.

por mi gran culpa. my great fault.

i had learned to repeat the words of guilt long before i understood what guilt could do to a person. i wonder whether i learned, without realizing it, to look inward first. to search myself for the wrongdoing, to assume that peace would come after confession, after repentance, after the necessary work had been done. perhaps i carried that instinct into places where it did not belong. perhaps i had spent so long believing that forgiveness was the proper ending to a story that i never stopped to ask whose responsibility it was to bring it about.

my therapist’s question made me think about the other places i had heard the same message. in conversations with family, in books and films, in the stories we tell about people who have been hurt and the people who hurt them. especially when the relationship is a family one.

“he’s your father, at the end of the day.”

“he always will be your father.”

“you’ll regret it when he’s gone.”

i had heard these things so often that they had become familiar, even predictable. they were presented as wisdom, as warnings offered by people who knew more about life than i did. they were supposed to remind me of what mattered, of what i might one day lose, of the things i would wish i had done differently when there was no longer an opportunity to do them.

but i never felt the certainty everyone else seemed to have about my future regret. i tried to imagine his death, tried to understand why the thought was supposed to make forgiveness easier, and found that it didn’t. i couldn’t see how someone dying would change what they had done while they were alive. i couldn’t understand why death was treated as a kind of absolution, why the fact that someone could no longer hurt you was supposed to make the hurt itself less significant.

why were we expected to speak differently about the dead? why was resentment considered acceptable until the moment someone died, after which we were suddenly expected to put it away? why did the end of someone’s life have to mean the end of our right to be honest about what they had done during it???

i kept coming back to the same question: what exactly was i supposed to regret?

that i hadn’t forgiven him? that i hadn’t found a way to make peace with someone who had never tried to make peace with me? that i had chosen distance over another opportunity to be hurt? was i supposed to wait until he died for my feelings to become understandable to other people? and if they still weren’t understandable then, would i be expected to forgive him anyway, because there would no longer be any point in holding on to anger?

i began to wonder whether forgiveness had become less of a personal choice and more of a social obligation, something people expected of you because the alternative made them uncomfortable. it is easier to tell someone to forgive than to accept that a relationship may be beyond repair. it is easier to remind a daughter that someone is her father than to sit with the possibility that being her father did not stop him from hurting her. forgiveness offers a reassuring ending. it allows everyone to believe that, eventually, the damage can be resolved and the family can become what it was supposed to be.

i wonder, too, whether part of that discomfort comes from the fact that my father never looked the way people expect an abusive parent to look. he had no addictions. he had a stable job, a big house, the outward appearance of a man who had his life together. he could present as a good father, a responsible adult, someone who had provided his family with the things a father was supposed to provide. i imagine it is difficult for people to reconcile that image with the possibility that the same man could be hurting his daughter behind the walls of that beautiful house. it is easier to preserve the version of him they recognize than to question what they thought they knew. it is easier to tell me that he’s still my father than to consider what it means that he was capable of treating me the way he did.

i have always been the first person to tell friends, family, sometimes even strangers, that you do not owe forgiveness to someone who has never asked for it. i say it easily when i am speaking about someone else’s life. i believe that people can move forward without forgiving the people who hurt them, that letting go of a relationship does not require letting go of the truth about it. i don’t believe that refusing to forgive automatically means living in resentment, or that anger has to become a permanent residence. you can decide that someone no longer belongs in your life. you can stop giving them your attention. you can reach a point where you rarely think about them at all.

i know this because i have done it myself.

he was the adult. i was the child. we shared a home for years, ate at the same table, lived behind the same walls, and shared the blood that people so often use as an argument for why family relationships must be preserved. i grew up believing that these things meant something, as children do. that a parent was someone who would protect you, that a home was somewhere you could feel safe, that the people who raised you were supposed to care what happened to you.

he knew what he was doing. he was old enough to understand the consequences of his actions, old enough to know that his children were not responsible for managing the damage he caused. and yet the harm continued for as long as i can remember. he would kick me out of the house and lock me outside. he would lock me in. he would withhold food from me. physically abuse me. i was a child who, as far as i understood it, was doing everything she could to be good. i behaved. i performed well. i learned to anticipate what was expected of me and to do it, to be agreeable, to try not to give him a reason. i kept trying to be the kind of child who might be left alone if she did everything right.

i have thought about that child often as an adult, about how much energy she spent trying to make herself easy to love, easy to live with, impossible to blame. some of the ways i learned to survive then have followed me into adulthood. they have shaped how i behave, how i respond to conflict, how quickly i look for the part of a situation that might be my fault. that is probably another essay in itself. for now, i can say that i was a child trying to survive a home in which being good did not guarantee being safe.

i still don’t know what he wanted from me in those moments. whether it was control, whether hurting me was enough in itself, whether he needed someone smaller than him to have less power than him. i spent years wondering what i could have done differently, what might have made him stop, what version of myself might have been enough to prevent it. i don’t have an answer that makes sense of any of it. i only know that i was a child, and he was responsible for what he chose to do to me.

he did not stop when he had the opportunity to stop. he did not become the person i needed him to be. even now, the behavior that made the relationship unbearable has not been replaced by an acknowledgment of what happened.

i left my childhood home one day and never went back.

i never saw the toys that had grown up alongside me, the pink walls that had watched over my childhood, the familiar corners of the place where i had spent seventeen years learning the shape of my own life. my hiding spots are still there, as far as i know, but i will never see them again. my bratz dolls, each with their own name and personality in my mind, were left behind. my childhood journals, the little things i had collected and kept, the memorabilia i had thought i would carry with me as i grew older, the small things i had been proud of. all of it remained in a place i could no longer return to.

those things had belonged to a version of me who believed she would always know how to get home.

if someone dropped me off in my hometown today, i think i would get lost. i spent seventeen years there. i walked to school. i knew the streets, the shortcuts, the places where i could find my way without thinking. i knew where my favorite teachers might be, where my friends and i used to go, which places felt familiar enough to belong to me. now i don’t know which of my favorite spots have closed, which shops have disappeared, which places have changed beyond recognition. i don’t know when any of it happened. the town kept going while i was gone, and i missed the slow disappearance of a world i had once thought would always be mine.

the possibility of running into one of my favorite teachers from childhood is slim. even if i did, i wonder whether they would recognize me, whether they would know where i went or why. i wonder what they remember of the girl who used to walk through those streets, the girl who went to school and came home again, the girl whose life looked ordinary enough from the outside.

the first years after moving to another state with my wonderful mother were filled with nightmares about him. i would wake up carrying the fear of the house i had left, the people i had left behind, the things i had loved and could no longer reach. even in a place where i was finally safe, my mind kept returning to the place where it had learned not to feel safe at all.

he took so much from me. my childhood, my trust, my sense of safety, the ease with which i once understood what it meant to be at home. he took the small, ordinary things i might have carried into adulthood without a second thought: my toys, my journals, the evidence of the person i had been before i knew how much of my life would have to be spent recovering from it. he took the possibility of returning to the place where i grew up and finding it waiting for me. he took years that i can remember only in fragments, years that i have spent trying to understand how a child can grow up in a house and still have to escape it.

and somehow, in the story other people wanted me to tell about what happened, i was still the one with unfinished work. i was the one who needed to forgive.

years have passed since i left. i have achieved things i once couldn’t imagine for myself. i have built a life of my own, and i am safe. i have beautiful people around me who love me, people who know me as i am now, who have become part of the life i spent so long trying to build. he is not part of that life. most of the time, i don’t think about him at all. he only comes to mind when someone asks about my family, or when a conversation turns to fathers, forgiveness, or the complicated expectations people have of daughters.

sometimes, it feels easier to say that he died.

it saves me from deciding how much of my history to tell a person who may not know what to do with it. i don’t know who will hear that i cut contact with my father and immediately decide that i must be cruel, that whatever happened could not have been bad enough to justify leaving. i don’t know who will respond with the familiar reminders that he’s still my dad, that family is family, that i’ll regret it one day. i don’t always want to find out. i don’t always have the energy to explain my childhood to someone just to convince them that my decision makes sense. my trauma is not a story i owe to every person who asks a question.

sometimes saying he died is easier than explaining that he is alive and i still chose to leave him behind. it is easier than defending a decision that has already given me my life back. i can avoid the questions, the disbelief, the judgment that can come from people who know nothing about what happened and still feel entitled to an opinion about what i should have done.

i don’t think that makes me dishonest in any way that matters. i think it means i have learned that access to my life is not something everyone is entitled to, and neither is access to the worst things that have happened to me.

i don’t need people to understand every detail of my childhood to know that leaving was the right decision. i don’t need to prove that i was hurt badly enough. i don’t need to give someone the full history of what happened behind the walls of that house so they will allow me to live without him.

and i don’t need to forgive him, either.

for a long time, i thought about him more than i wanted to. i would catch a glimpse of a stranger and see his face in theirs. i would remember something, feel the old anger return, and wonder whether that meant i was still carrying too much of the past with me. i thought that perhaps the fact that i could still be affected by what had happened meant i had not finished healing.

but i don’t think about him that way anymore. i don’t look for his face in strangers. i don’t feel as if i owe him something that i have yet to give. i have built a life in which he is not present, and i have learned that his absence does not have to be filled by forgiveness.

i don’t know what i will feel when he dies. i don’t know whether i will grieve, whether i will feel relief, whether i will feel nothing at all. i no longer think i need to decide in advance. whatever happens then will belong to me, too, and i don’t want to spend the years between now and then preparing myself to feel the way other people think i should.

i think about the child i was, the one who had no say in the circumstances she was born into, who didn’t choose her father or the things he did, who didn’t know she would eventually have to leave so much behind to be safe. i think about how many years that child spent believing that the way forward was to become capable of forgiving him. as though her healing depended on offering him something he had never asked for, as though the future of her life rested on whether she could find it in herself to give him that final kindness.

i don’t believe that anymore.

i don’t think sharing blood creates a debt. i don’t think the years spent under the same roof, the meals shared, the title of father, or the fact that someone once had a place in your childhood means they are entitled to a place in your future. i don’t think death turns harm into something harmless, or that forgiveness is the only evidence that a person has healed. and i don’t believe that every wound needs to end with the person who caused it being forgiven.

maybe forgiveness is meaningful for some people. maybe one day it will mean something different to me. i don’t need to rule it out forever to know that i am not obligated to pursue it now. i can leave the question open without making it the work of my life.

for years, i thought forgiveness was a door i had to find a way to walk through. i kept returning to it, trying different keys, convinced that the inability to open it meant i was the one doing something wrong.

now i think i may have been standing at a door i was never required to open.

my life has continued on the other side of it. i have grown up, moved away, made a home, and become someone who no longer needs to explain why she left. the child who once lived in that house is still part of me, but she is no longer there. she does not have to go back. she does not have to wait for him to change, for him to apologize, or for the day when other people decide that enough time has passed.

she does not have to forgive him to be allowed to leave.

she already did!!

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last autumn, i spent almost every night with you. we were both alone, with nowhere else we needed to be, and somehow the darkness became ours. for months, we were hopelessly addicted to each other. we talked through the night regardless of what waited for us the next morning. i would wake up exhausted, sometimes with another headache waiting for me, and still think it had been worth it. i always thought you were worth borrowing time from the next day for. there was always another thing i wanted to tell you, another question i wanted to ask, another little corner of you i wanted to uncover. i loved learning you. i loved how much there was to learn.

we were still discovering ourselves, and somehow we were discovering each other at the same time. i loved how easily we could become whoever we wanted together. there were things i could tell you because it was you, things i could ask because it was you. you made it feel safe to keep opening doors, and i don’t think you ever knew how much that mattered to me.

and somewhere in all that discovering, we started desiring each other in a way that felt completely natural. every time, we seemed to fall into the same rhythm without even trying. you were so good with my body, so attentive to it, so gentle with something you clearly loved having in your hands. you knew how to make me feel wanted, how to make me feel safe enough to completely let go. my body learned you quickly. it got used to your voice, your touch, the way you made me feel. i didn’t know then how difficult it would be for it to let you go when you eventually left. for months afterward, it felt like my body was still waiting for yours. i couldn’t get anywhere without you. it was like you had taught it a language that only you could speak.

the beginning of us had been so intense that i half expected it to burn itself out, the way beautiful things sometimes do when you give them too much oxygen. instead, winter came and you stayed. all that heat settled into something warmer. you became familiar. your presence slipped so deeply into my life that eventually i stopped thinking of you as someone who might leave. you had become part of the landscape.

and we kept building. i don’t know when it happened exactly, but somewhere between the nights and the mornings, we had made a whole little world. we built it out of stories about college and childhood, favorite video games and old memories, your family and mine. you taught me about football and i taught you about my favorite books. we talked about flowers and culture and languages, about the things that shaped us before we knew each other. every conversation seemed to add another room. every new thing i learned about you gave me somewhere else to go. we kept adding to it until it felt like there was a place in the world that belonged specifically to us.

sometimes, on the loneliest nights, i still wish you would write to me. i wish your name would appear on my phone and you’d ask, casually, if i could talk for five minutes. five minutes, as if we don’t both know what that would become. five minutes would become hours. hours would become morning. we’d keep talking until the sky outside my window turned that pale, light blue, the same color as your eyes. i’d look outside and realize we’d done it again, we’d somehow talked our way through another night, and neither of us would be willing to be the one to say goodbye.

i have all this knowledge of you with nowhere to put it. i have it in my journals, in little pages and memories i wrote down because i knew i wouldn’t want to forget. i know the music you listen to, what makes you laugh, your favorite childhood games, your favorite sports. i know your dreams. i know what breaks your heart and what makes you sad. i know about your family, the people who raised you, the stories you’ve told me about them. i know your football superstitions. i know you won’t wear the other team’s colors when yours is playing, not even a single thread of them. i stopped wearing them too. i wanted you to know i had your back.

and as useless as all of this knowledge can feel now, i don’t think i came away empty-handed. you taught me so much about myself. about what i like, what i want, what makes me feel wanted, what parts of myself i had never thought to look for. i hope i gave you some of that too. i hope there are things you learned about yourself because you knew me. i hope some part of me made you understand yourself a little better.

by the end of winter, the beginning of spring, we had gotten busy. we started talking more sporadically. neither of us ever really admitted what was happening, not properly. and then we had our last conversation. i told you i’d always be here for you.

months later, that still stands.

we may never talk again. i don’t know if we will. but i meant it when i said it, and i still mean it now.

i hope you’re okay. i hope you’re happy. i hope the person you’re with is good to you. i hope she makes you laugh and listens when you talk and understands the things that matter to you. i hope you’re having a beautiful time together.

i just hope it’s not better than ours.

i hope your football sundays are still sacred. i know how much they mean to you. i hope they’re good, but i hope they feel a little empty without me this year. i hope you remember how enthusiastic i was about learning all of it, even when i knew absolutely nothing. i hope you still think of me when you hear the music i showed you. i hope certain dates make you pause. i hope there are pieces of me caught inside your life without you even meaning to keep them.

i hope i left a handprint somewhere.

just proof that i was there, the same way you left one in me.

maybe one day you’ll see lilies, peonies, or tulips and think of me. you knew they were my favorites, the flowers you’d get for me just because you knew i loved them. i hope you still remember. maybe you’ll remember the way we spent whole nights talking, the way we kept finding another thing to say, the way autumn somehow became ours without us ever deciding that it would.

i don’t know what i am to you now.

maybe you don’t think about me at all. maybe i’m somewhere in the back of your memory, attached to a season, a song, a few nights you barely remember.

i think about you differently.

you’re in too many small things. in the weather. in music. in the things i learned to love because you loved them first. in october, especially.

maybe that’s what remains when someone leaves your life. not the person, exactly. just all the little places they managed to leave themselves behind.

i hope i survive autumn without you.

and then winter will come, and i’ll have to learn that one too. maybe one day the cold will just be cold again. maybe the seasons will stop feeling like things i have to get through and start feeling like mine again.

but for now, i’ll let october remind me of you.

i think there are worse things than remembering someone you once loved when the world turns beautiful.

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Friday, May 3rd, 2024

something has changed.

not enough to name,
only enough to notice.

a name slips from your mouth
that has never lived in our house before,
then disappears behind an explanation
that changes when I ask once more.

a random city suddenly matters,
a place we’ve never been,
and you speak of it with the strange familiarity
of someone remembering
instead of imagining.

new songs.
new interests.
new little pieces of the world
appearing in your hands
as if someone else has placed them there…

and I watch you
and wonder when you have become
a stranger with familiar eyes.

but perhaps I’m imagining it.

perhaps I’ve become too good
at turning crumbs into clues,
at finding fingerprints
where there are only smudges,
at building a crime scene
out of an ordinary room.

maybe I’m micromanaging you.

maybe I’m overthinking again.

I can’t believe I’m damaged enough
to mistake a shadow for a shape
and silence for a confession.

you look at me
like the question itself
is more suspicious than the answer.

and I start explaining myself.

sorry.

I’m sorry for overthinking.

I know I’m insecure.

I know you would never.

so I learn to smile
when something feels wrong.

Denial

Saturday, May 18th, 2024

he would never.

I know this
the way I know
the sun is still there
behind closed curtains.

he holds my old wounds
like glass,
never pressing where it hurts.

his people are good.

his mother loves me.
his friends know my name.
he loves me.

we have found
the little piece of heaven
people spend their whole lives
looking for.

surely no one
sets fire to a home
while they are still
sleeping inside it.

Obsession

Thursday, January 9th, 2025

every time I enter the room
and your phone goes dark.

every notification
a small bell
inside my chest.

every task that takes too long,
every pause,
every stutter

I collect them all.

a glance.
a silence.
a screen turned away.

could it be?

could it be?

I turn every ordinary thing
over in my hands
until it cuts me.

Discovery

Tuesday, February 4th, 2025

I wanted to be wrong.

after all the crumbs,
the fingerprints,
the shadows I kept mistaking for shapes,
I wanted to find nothing
but my own fear
waiting for me at the end of it.

so I looked.

and everything was clean.

suspiciously clean.

no cracks in the walls,
no evidence of a fire,
only the strange feeling
that someone had already swept away the ashes.

but there were pieces.

words that sounded familiar.
places I didn’t recognize.
little pieces of you
that felt like they had my fingerprints on them.

so I kept pulling the thread.

and slowly,
the story began writing itself.

the same charm.
the same attention.
the same little pieces of magic
I thought belonged to us.

only they didn’t.

not only us.

there were others.

i reached the fourth
and had to put it down.

i couldn’t keep watching
the beginning of our love story
happen again and again and again
in someone else’s hands.

hours disappearing into the night.
whole evenings given away.
gifts crossing distances.
little worlds being built
that I had thought
only existed between us.

you gave away things
I thought I had inspired.

words I thought
were born between us.

and the worst part
was how beautiful it all was.

they were falling for you.

of course they were.

you were giving them
the same tenderness
that once made me believe
I was the only one.

and suddenly
all those times you told me
I had nothing to fear
were standing there
contradicting you.

how could you?

how could you hold me
like I was the only one
while making other people
feel exactly the same?

Rage

Thursday, February 6th, 2025

what a performance!!!

you wore goodness like it was stitched into your skin.

standing ovation!!

the family who adored me.
the friends who trusted you.
the promises you delivered
with such convincing tenderness.

and all that time,
something rotten
was breathing underneath.

I cannot believe you fooled me.

I thought I had found the one man who could never become the thing i feared.

what did you lack?

I gave you everything that made you feel like yourself.

what hunger could possibly make a man need so many hands reaching for him?

I loved you into becoming the man you were so proud to be.

and you repaid me by making me afraid of you

you say you understand

then why did you keep going?

how far did you think you could take me before I finally broke?

because I want to break something in you now.

I want another man to want me openly,
to put his hands on me with the confidence you once had.

and I want you there.

I want you to watch me let him

maybe then you will understand what your betrayal actually feels like.

and if you don’t,

I’ll do it again, and again, and again

Temptation

Friday, February 14th, 2025

I was out on a walk,
still carrying you,
when a handsome stranger
came into view.

tall, broad, strong,
dark eyes, dark hair,
a square jaw,
a well-trimmed beard,
freckles everywhere,
long eyelashes,
cool tattoos.

and suddenly
I had something new to lose.

I told myself
I could use a friend.

but I knew what his intentions were
before I knew how this would end.

his accent was distinctly English,
but from another part of the country,
nothing like the one
I had grown so used to hearing from you.

he knew what he wanted.
he was sweet about it,
but he never seemed unsure.

and I was perplexed.

I had been so content with you
that I had forgotten
there were other kinds of beautiful.

I had never imagined
another man beside me.

that was how loyal I was.

until suddenly
I wanted to know
what it felt like.

a different body.
broader.
heavier.
stronger.

so much more
than I had known to ask for.

I had settled
without even knowing I was settling.

after months of crying
for you to tell me the truth,
after begging you
to stop making me doubt my own eyes,

I wanted to be wanted
without having to beg for it.

so let him look.
let him come closer.
let his hands learn
what you were so careless with.

let you watch.

maybe then
you’ll finally understand
what it feels like
to know the person you love
is wanted somewhere else.

and maybe
I’ll let him have me.

Grief

Saturday, June 28th, 2025

I mourn my innocence

the girl who saw the world
with love instead of suspicion

who believed in futures
without wondering
what would ruin them

you had everything
and still decided
it wasn’t enough

and somehow
I am the one
who has to repair
what you broke

twice a week,
I sit in therapy.
I read the books.
I sit in rooms
with other heartbroken women
trying to make sense
of something they never asked for.

I never asked for any of this.

I used to think of those girls
with rage.

how could they fall for MY man?

now I see them
as victims too.

you knew
what they didn’t.

you knew there was
never going to be
a future with them,
and let them fall anyway

I made sure everyone knows
what you did

so you’re held accountable.
so you don’t get to do this
again

I hope your therapist helps

because I am still mourning
everything I thought
my life was going to be

the innocence.
the certainty.
the futures
that died before they happened.

and some days
that is all I have.

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te recuerdo entero. en detalle que hasta duele. la forma en que me mirabas como si verme fuera algo que te costaba contener, como si unos segundos con tus ojos encima de mí nunca fueran suficientes.

dime las mentiras que me gusta oír, a este punto es lo único que me hace sentir. piénsame como yo te pienso a ti, espero no dejarte dormir.

quiero que te toques pensando en mí, que cierres los ojos y desees que te esté mirando, que gimas mi nombre en silencio solo deseando que yo lo estuviera escuchando, que quieras mis ojos en tu cuerpo mientras te pierdes en lo que no puedes controlar, que ningún momento de placer sea completo si no sientes que te estoy mirando desde algún lugar.

que recuerdes exactamente cómo te miraba, que eso sea lo primero que te llegue en la madrugada, que busques esa mirada en otras y no la encuentres, que te falte. que ningún cuerpo te lleve adonde yo te llevaba, que la distancia entre nosotros te queme y te arda.

que sientas mis curvas en la oscuridad, mis manos, mi cabello, el peso exacto de mi cuerpo, que toques otra cintura y en ese instante recuerdes la mía y te duela en el centro.

que todas sean hermosas pero algo les falte, que abraces otra piel y sientas el vacío, que ninguna llene mi molde exactamente, que siempre haya algo que no sea mío.

búscame en canciones, en camas vacías, en cuerpos que no se sientan como el mío, quiero vivir en ese pequeño espacio entre el sueño y la vigilia, donde nadie puede tocarte pero yo siempre puedo encontrarte.

quiero que veas alma por todas partes, que leas la palabra y por un segundo creas que soy yo llamándote, que antes de ser palabra fue mi nombre y que deje de significar cualquier alma y signifique solo la mía.

que la escuches en una conversación y se te haga un nudo en la garganta, que pierdas por un segundo la razón, que te preguntes dónde estoy, si todavía pienso en ti como tú piensas en mí.

que busques mi cara en cada mujer que mires, que ninguna tenga mi mirada, mi sonrisa, esa expresión que tanto querías y que te persigue todavía.

que todas sean hermosas, pero que ninguna sea yo, que mi ausencia tenga peso, que se sienta sobre tu pecho y te quite el aire y te obligue a recordarme.

que me encuentres en tus sueños y despiertes buscándome, que el sueño se te vaya cada vez que intentes olvidarme, que descanses solamente cuando puedas hablarme.

qué desgracia querer tanto a alguien que una parte de mí no sepa si abrazarlo o atormentarlo.

te estoy dando todo lo que llevo, cárgalo tú ahora, quédate con este deseo, que mi nombre te persiga como el tuyo a mí, por todas las noches, por todas las horas.

y mientras tú cargas con todo esto, mientras me buscas y no me encuentras, yo voy soltando lo que me pesa, cada vez que te duela es una cadena que se me suelta.

Alma

que nunca vuelva a ser solo una palabra.

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a few weeks ago i was laughing more than i was thinking. talking to people, reading, making plans, moving through my days with that quiet momentum that makes life feel like it’s going somewhere. i would sit down and open my notes app and just stare. no poems, no sentences, no 2am thoughts demanding to be written down. not a block exactly, just nothing unfinished inside me looking for a way out. the pen stayed where i left it. the pages stayed empty. i was too busy being alive to write about it.

and then the sadness came back. slowly at first, the way water rises before you notice it’s reached your chest. and suddenly i couldn’t write fast enough. poems, sentences, thoughts that have nothing to do with what i’m going through and everything to do with needing to let something out before i go under. like if i don’t write it down it will stay inside me and take up all the air. it’s less about having something to say and more about needing to release something, anything, just to keep breathing.

it made me wonder if i’ve been asking myself the wrong question all along.

i’ve always assumed sadness made me more creative. but maybe that’s not it. maybe i’m only more curious when i’m hurting. maybe pain demands an explanation in a way happiness never does. happiness doesn’t ask questions. it simply exists, and you exist inside it, and somehow that feels like enough. sadness refuses to leave until i understand why it arrived. writing has always been how i do that. the closest thing i have to sitting across from myself and asking what happened here??

so maybe i don’t write because i’m creative. maybe i write because i don’t understand. and maybe i’ve mistaken introspection for creativity this entire time.

it makes me wonder whether i’ve accidentally taught myself that creativity only lives where something is unresolved. as if the deepest part of me only wakes up when it has something to mourn, defend, or make sense of. as if joy, by simply being enough, leaves nothing behind for me to chase.

and that thought frightens me more than i expected. because the parts of myself i admire most have always lived there. the curiosity, the instinct to sit with a feeling until it gives me its real name, the strange comfort of refusing to look away before i’ve found the shape of something. i always believed those things belonged to me. now i wonder if they only belong to the version of me that is hurting. what if the woman who notices everything, who reaches for metaphors before explanations, who finds words for things other people only feel, only exists because pain keeps inviting her in.

what if happiness doesn’t silence her.

what if she simply never learned how to speak there.

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llevo días alimentando una criatura que solo despierta cuando pienso en ti 
vive debajo de mi lengua, araña despacio
le desespera no saber si volverás a mí

dice que el hambre no razona 
el hambre no entiende dignidad, no pregunta si después va a doler
siempre confunde lo que alimenta con lo que destruye

a veces juro escucharte gemir
no sé si es memoria
o la manera en que el hambre aprendió a mentir

mi memoria se ha vuelto descortés,
me devuelve recuerdos que nunca ocurrieron 
como si el deseo también tuviera derecho a inventar lo que fue

quisiera hundir mis dientes
no en tu piel, en lo que escondes adentro  
hasta llegar al lugar donde escondes todo aquello que juraría haberte puesto yo 

quiero abrirte 
como quien rompe una fruta demasiado madura,
solo para saber si eres todo lo que me inventé
o si solo eres lo que el hambre quiso hacerte

o si nunca fuiste más que una mirada a la que le inventé un destino,
unos tatuajes demasiado pequeños para todo lo que les pedí significar,
un largo torso al que mi memoria regresa con una devoción que ya me avergüenza

qué suerte tienes
sigues viviendo como si nada 
mientras yo negocio con esta criatura
que insiste en convencerme de que el apetito y el amor son la misma cosa 

qué suerte no saber que alguien te construyó un templo 
y luego quedó encerrada adentro 

hay días en los que casi cedo
hay días en los que quisiera dejar de ser una mujer y convertirme en pura hambre

pero también sé que si alguna vez consiguiera saciarla,
no encontraría nada

solo descubriría que el monstruo nunca fuiste tú,
siempre fui yo,
inventándote hasta volverme 
salvaje 

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it taught me that if i wanted to know something, i could. every answer seemed to exist somewhere, just waiting for me to find it.

the internet became my teacher, my library, my hiding place, my window.

i don’t think children should have the entire world at their fingertips, but i did. somewhere among chat rooms, forums, reddit rabbit holes, and people i was never supposed to meet, the internet expanded my world.

it also filled it with people.

some of the most important people in my life exist behind little numbers on my world clock app. one hour behind, three hours ahead, seven hours ahead, fifteen and a half hours ahead. i know what time it is where they are before i know what time it is in most cities in my own country. i know whether they're asleep, whether they're at work, or whether they're just waking up. i check the weather where they live almost absentmindedly. i don't know when that became an act of love, but somewhere along the way, it did.

i think that's the strangest thing about the internet. it lets complete strangers become familiar enough that i know the sound of their worries before i know how they walk. i’ve learned people's darkest secrets without ever standing beside them. i’ve listened to heartbreaks unfold in real time through a screen. i’ve been there for people who have never sat across from me at a table. sometimes i know what keeps someone awake atnight, but i couldn't tell you the color of their front door.

distance has taught me a completely different way of measuring closeness.

i don't think in kilometers anymore, i think in hours.

sometimes the earth itself decides when a conversation ends. one of us has to wake up early the next day. one of us should already be asleep. one of us says “i really have to go” and the conversation gets cut short not because we're done talking, but because the planet keeps spinning.

i get irrationally angry at time zones.

i hate that i’ve met people i could talk to for hours, only for a fifteen hour time difference to stand between us. i hate that there are conversations that would have lasted all day if we had lived in the same place. i hate that sometimes i have to decide whether another hour talking to someone is worth the headache i’ll wake up with the next morning.

and most times… it is.

some of my favorite conversations have happened when i knew i was making a bad decision by staying awake. there is something strangely beautiful about looking at the time, knowing tomorrow is going to be miserable, and deciding that right now matters more. distance has a funny way of turning small sacrifices into really meaningful ones.

what surprises me even more is when someone else makes that choice too.

when someone stays awake for me.

when someone waits until i’m awake before sending something they wanted to tell me.

when someone rearranges their evening just enough that our days overlap a little longer.

suddenly distance feels less like an obstacle and more like proof. proof that somewhere, someone thought i was worth borrowing an hour from tomorrow.

i’ve been lucky enough to meet some of these people.

there is nothing quite like watching someone you've only ever known through a screen walk toward you for the first time. it feels impossible. almost like watching fiction become real. your brain already knows them, your heart already knows them, it’s only your body that's catching up.

i’ve learned that airports can feel like beginnings. that meeting halfway can feel like love. that some people are worth crossing oceans for, even if all you're crossing is the distance between who they were online and who they are standing in front of you.

i still wish i could fold maps. i wish i could smooth the earth flat with my hands until every seven hour difference became seven minutes. i wish i conversations didn't have expiration dates decided by sunrise somewhere else. i wish i could appear on someone else's doorstep as easily as i can appear in their notifications.

but maybe that's also why these connections mean so much to me.

because despite the distance, despite the clocks, despite the exhaustion, despite the waiting, we keep finding each other anyway.

the map wins most days.

but every now and then, we do.

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a forgotten message.

a conversation i somehow leave carrying by myself.

care that only ever seems to travel one way.

none of these things are large enough to explain what follows.

and yet,

they never arrive alone.

they find each other.

they pull old disappointments out of places i thought i had emptied years ago.

suddenly i am no longer reacting to what happened.

i am reacting to everything that ever felt like it.

i know people cannot read my mind.

i know love has never looked exactly the same from both sides.

i know no one wakes up wondering how to disappoint me.

most days,

i believe it.

but resentment has a remarkable memory.

it keeps everything.

every silence.

every forgotten promise.

every hope that felt too small to mourn.

it never throws anything away.

until something almost invisible

is enough to bring the whole thing down.

sometimes i think resentment is grief

that got tired of being gentle.

other times,

i wonder if i’m simply an angry person

who has spent years

calling it something else.

i haven’t decided

which possibility frightens me more.

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or maybe it’s a greenhouse.
or a museum.
i’ve never quite figured out what to call it.

i only know that everything i love eventually finds its way there.

songs bloom there forever.

they never end where they’re supposed to.
they keep echoing through little winding paths, climbing ivy-covered walls, lingering in the air like they’re waiting for someone to hum along.

books don’t leave either.

their last pages close, but the characters never seem to notice.
they just wander deeper into the garden, still talking, still laughing, still becoming who they were always going to be.
i visit them every now and then.
sometimes they recognize me.

people arrive quietly.

a conversation on a tuesday afternoon.
someone’s laugh.
a pair of kind eyes.
a stranger i’ll never speak to again.
someone i only know through a screen.

i don’t ask them to stay.

they just do.

they become flowers i’ve never seen anywhere else.
they grow beside songs and stories and old versions of myself, until i can no longer remember what was real and what simply became beautiful because i thought about it for long enough.

sometimes i’ll hear one lyric and disappear for an hour.

sometimes i’ll meet someone for five minutes and accidentally imagine five years.

sometimes reality gives me something so small, so ordinary,
that my mind can’t help but water it until it blooms.

i don’t think i’m escaping.

i’ve never wanted another life.

i’ve just always loved watching this one unfold a little further than it actually did.

i like borrowing tomorrow for a moment.

i like letting conversations continue after they’ve ended.

i like believing that beautiful things don’t have to disappear just because the moment they belonged to has passed.

so i keep the garden alive.

i walk through it often.

i straighten the picture frames in the museum.

i water flowers that only exist because i imagined them into bloom.

and every now and then, when the world feels especially loud, i step inside for a little while.

not to hide.

just to admire everything i’ve ever loved, all in one place.

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Everyone else seemed confused. Some people laughed. Others called it too strange, too absurd, too long. They walked out talking about Ari Aster’s absurd imagination.

I walked out feeling like I’d just watched someone put my childhood on a screen.

People describe the film as being about anxiety. I don’t think that’s what stayed with me.

What stayed with me was watching someone move through a world where every fear feels irrational to everyone except him. Beau is terrified of things that seem almost laughable from the outside. He hesitates, panics, apologizes, and assumes the worst at every turn. As the story unfolds, you begin to understand why. The fear was never spontaneous. It was cultivated. The person who claimed to love him most had spent his entire life teaching him that the world was dangerous, that he couldn’t trust himself, and that safety could only ever be found by returning to her.

By the end of the film, reality itself begins to unravel. What first looked like a coincidence starts looking like design. People who seemed random no longer feel random. Obstacles that appeared unfortunate no longer feel accidental. You slowly realize that the world Beau has been trying so desperately to survive has been quietly shaped around him all along.

That’s what broke me.

Not because the movie revealed something I didn’t already know.

Because it gave a shape to something I’d never been able to see outside of myself.

I wasn’t watching someone else’s anxiety.

I was watching what it feels like to spend your childhood navigating a world built by someone else’s fear, control, and guilt.

I went to see the movie alone.

Everyone else walked out talking about how strange it had been.

I stayed in my seat for a while longer, trying to understand why I’d just spent three hours watching someone else’s life and somehow recognized my own.

My father was incredibly charming. (That sentence is important because if I start anywhere else, people tend not to believe the rest)

He was funny. Charismatic. Strong. The kind of dad other people wished they had. He didn’t drink. He didn’t have the habits people usually associate with abusive parents. Friends, relatives, strangers… everyone loved him. Whenever people met him, they’d tell me how lucky I was.

I believed them for a long time.

I also believed that because I didn’t have bruises, maybe it wasn’t really abuse.

That’s one of the cruelest parts about emotional abuse. It doesn’t leave obvious evidence. It leaves confusion. It leaves children convinced they’re the problem.

Growing up in that house meant understanding that every basic necessity came with conditions.

Whether I could eat. Whether I could shower. Whether I could leave the house. Whether I could go to school. Whether I had access to electricity, the internet, my house keys, my own room, or even my mother depended entirely on him. Comfort wasn’t something I was entitled to; it was something he decided I had earned that day.

He didn’t need to hit me.

He just needed me to know he had complete control over my life.

So I learned to shrink.

I learned to tiptoe.

I learned to study his expressions before speaking.

I learned that peace wasn’t something we shared; it was something I had to maintain.

He would say the cruelest things with such casual certainty that I genuinely believed them. There wasn’t yelling every minute of every day. Sometimes it was worse than yelling. Sometimes it was a quiet sentence delivered like an objective fact, and because he was my father, I accepted it as truth.

Children don’t naturally assume their parents are wrong.

They assume they deserve what’s happening.

Looking back, I don’t remember my childhood as a series of isolated events.

I remember living in survival mode.

One of the reasons Beau Is Afraid affected me so deeply is that Beau spends the entire film terrified of a world that was never as dangerous as the person who raised him made it seem. I recognized that immediately.

When I finally left home, I realized something I wish I had understood years earlier.

The world wasn’t nearly as frightening as my father had taught me it was.

Leaving wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t empowering. It was necessary.

By seventeen, I knew that if I stayed, I wasn’t going to survive, not necessarily because I thought he would kill me, but because I couldn’t imagine a future where I was allowed to become a person. Every year that passed, the walls of that house seemed to close in a little more.

So my mom and I left.

People often ask whether I tried to repair the relationship.

I did.

I went back once, a year after escaping.

I wanted to believe that time had changed something. That maybe enough distance had softened whatever had happened between us.

Instead, I found myself trapped all over again.

The control started immediately. The same need to decide whether I could leave, whether I had access to the outside world, whether I was allowed autonomy. This time was even worse.

That was the moment I understood something I had been resisting for years.

He wasn’t going to change.

I escaped that house twice.

The first time, because I needed to.

The second time, because I finally accepted I would always need to.

What surprised me most wasn’t escaping.

It was what came after.

I was furious.

Not because I missed him.

Because I had to spend years fixing something I didn’t break.

Therapy became part of my life. So did journaling. Books. Podcasts. Long conversations. Anything that could help me understand why I felt guilty for existing, why I apologized before speaking, why I believed love had to be earned.

I remember sitting in therapy thinking, over and over again:

Why am I paying to repair damage someone else caused?

It felt profoundly unfair.

Around that time, I read I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy.

For the first time, I saw someone write honestly about an abusive parent without rushing toward forgiveness.

That mattered to me. I felt seen again, validated.

People love asking whether you’ve forgiven them.

Very few people ask what they did that made forgiveness feel impossible in the first place.

The sentence I’ve heard most throughout my life is:

“At the end of the day, he’s still your dad.”

Every single time I hear it, I think the same thing.

At the end of the day…

I was still his daughter.

I was the child.

Do you have any idea how bad things have to become before a child willingly loses a parent?

Children don’t casually walk away from their parents.

They walk away because staying becomes unbearable.

Another thing people like telling me is that I should thank him.

That if it weren’t for everything he put me through, I wouldn’t have become independent. I wouldn’t have moved away to a different state. I wouldn’t have built the life I have. I wouldn’t have the career I do. I wouldn’t travel. I wouldn’t be who I am.

I understand why people say it.

But I strongly disagree.

I don’t give him any credit.

None.

He didn’t build this life.

My mother did.

My support system did.

My therapists did.

Most importantly, I did.

He made my life harder.

I became myself anyway.

Sometimes people ask if I ever think about him now.

The answer is less often than they probably expect.

He still tells fake stories about me.

He still finds ways to stalk watch from a distance.

That used to consume me.

Now it doesn’t.

I still dream about him sometimes.

He still appears in nightmares.

For years, waking up from one meant carrying him with me for the rest of the day.

Now I wake up, make breakfast, and continue living.

That, more than anything, is how I measure healing.

Not forgiveness.

Not forgetting.

Just the quiet realization that the person who once occupied every corner of your mind no longer gets to decide what kind of day you’ll have.

People still tell me Beau Is Afraid is strange; people still raise an eyebrow when I say it’s my favorite movie.

I never found it strange.

I found it familiar.

And maybe that’s why I keep coming back to it.

Because every time I watch Beau slowly realize the world is bigger than the fear he inherited, I’m reminded that I did too.

Despite him, I became myself.

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it finds its way out before i can think twice.

into songs sent without hesitation.

into words written down after good days, like i am afraid of forgetting how they felt.

into dreams described in detail to the person they were about.

i don’t know when the world decided that this was too much to show.

that feeling openly was a kind of weakness.

that the dignified thing was to hold back.

to make someone wonder.

to arrive at your own emotions slowly,

like you have somewhere better to be.

i have watched people learn that language

and i have never been able to follow.

and most days i don’t want to.

but there is a quiet that follows me home.

a specific kind of alone

that has nothing to do with how much i am loved

and everything to do with wondering if anyone will ever arrive at my door

the way i have always arrived at theirs.

with a song they saved for me.

with something they noticed and couldn’t keep to themselves.

with the kind of detail that says

i was thinking about you and i wanted you to know exactly how.

i wonder sometimes if that exists anymore.

if the world has just grown too far from it.

if i am waiting for something that is quietly going out of fashion.

i hope i never change.

i hope i never learn to hold back.

but some nights i sit with the tenderness of it all

and wonder if anyone is coming

who loves the way i do.

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doors open, hands reach.

people look at me with such impossible tenderness that I begin to believe I must have done something extraordinary long ago and simply forgotten it.

there is evidence everywhere.

a voice saying thank you.

a stranger remembering my name.

someone asking me to stay.

someone asking me to speak.

I receive so much warmth that its absence, even briefly, feels like an offense. like the quiet is somehow louder than all the praise that came before it. one afternoon without it and I am already wondering what changed.

I know what I am capable of.

this has never been the problem.

I have never been afraid of ending up somewhere small. I always knew, in that quiet and unreasonable way, that I would find my way to something beautiful. I have always trusted that about myself.

and yet.

and yet.

and yet!!

there is a held breath inside me that never fully releases.

something that wakes before I do and starts asking questions I have not prepared for.

what if this was the last good thing?

what if the garden has finally noticed that I do not belong in it?

what if all these years I have merely been standing very still and calling it certainty?

sometimes I think confidence and fear sleep beside one another.

one gets dressed slowly, deliberately, like it has nowhere to be but everywhere to arrive.

the other checks the door twice before leaving.

one speaks first in every room.

the other is already composing the apology.

and I belong to both of them.

I collect praise like pressed flowers.

I place it carefully between the pages.

I tell myself:

look.

look!!

look how loved, look how trusted, look how wanted.

and still there are mornings when all the praise is there and I cannot feel any of it.

I do not know why.

but I keep collecting it anyway.

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i meet someone and almost immediately my mind begins wandering ahead of me. a few conversations become significance. a shared joke becomes familiarity. the smallest kindness gathers weight and suddenly i find myself holding something much larger than what was ever placed in my hands.

i do not think i fall in love with people, i think i fall in love with possibility.

i become fascinated by the space between what is and what could be. i start imagining futures before there is even a present sturdy enough to stand on. before i have learned their favorite color, before i know how they take their coffee, before i know whether they are capable of showing up consistently, some ancient and unreasonable part of me is already wondering whether they would choose me over everyone else in the room.

it is almost laughable how quickly my expectations arrive.

devotion appears in my imagination long before trust has had the chance to grow roots. loyalty appears before history. certainty appears while mystery is still standing right in front of me.

the strange thing is that none of this comes from thinking poorly of myself.

quite the opposite!!

i genuinely like who i am. i think i am worthy of love. i think i am worthy of attention, worthy of care, worthy of being chosen. which is why i find myself staring at this contradiction over and over again, turning it around in my hands and examining it from every angle.

if i think so highly of myself, why am i always in such a hurry?

why does some part of me seem convinced that affection should accelerate toward devotion? why do i keep expecting people to arrive where i already am emotionally when we have barely begun?

i know how to attract attention. i know how to make myself desirable. i know how easily desire can be invited into a room. and if i am honest, i enjoy it. i enjoy being wanted. i enjoy the feeling of power that comes with understanding exactly what effect i can have on someone.

sometimes i wonder whether i lean on that too heavily.

not because i think it is wrong. not because i feel ashamed of it.

i simply wonder.

i wonder whether i occasionally mistake desire for closeness. i wonder whether being wanted sometimes creates the illusion of being known. i wonder whether i am giving people a version of me that is easier to admire than to understand.

and yet i benefit from it too much to pretend otherwise.

that is what makes the question difficult.

there is no villain in this story.

only a girl who knows exactly how to get attention and keeps finding herself wanting something attention cannot provide.

because attention is immediate.

what i seem to want is permanence.

i want to become part of someone’s internal landscape. i want to be anticipated. remembered. chosen repeatedly without having to ask!

sometimes i think i simply have an unreasonable amount of faith in potential. i see the smallest spark and immediately begin imagining constellations around it. i encounter possibility and treat it like a promise.

perhaps that is why i always feel slightly ahead of my own life.

my imagination arrives first.

my feelings arrive shortly after.

and reality, patient as ever, follows somewhere behind, trying its best to catch up.

They tell me I’m thoughtful. Attentive. Easy to talk to.

They tell me I make people feel seen.

And I never know quite how to respond.

I learned a lot of it by accident.

I learned to notice changes in a room. Learned to anticipate. Learned to prepare myself for moods that hadn’t arrived yet.

Learned to rehearse apologies before anyone was upset.

It turns out people like these things.

They call it empathy.

Emotional intelligence.

Thoughtfulness.

They trust you when you can tell something is wrong before they say it out loud. They appreciate you when you remember the details. When you notice the shift in energy. When you make things easier.

And the truth is, I like that they appreciate it.

I like being someone people can rely on.

I like making people feel understood.

That’s what makes it difficult.

Because I do care.

I really do.

The care is real.

The kindness is real.

But sometimes I wonder where it came from.

Sometimes I wonder where the line is.

Where survival ends and personality begins.

Whether I became this way because it was always who I was, or because paying attention once felt necessary.

Because underneath all of it…

the attentiveness,
the thoughtfulness,
the instinct to smooth every rough edge…

is a little girl

listening carefully from the next room,

trying to figure out whether today is a good day

or a bad one.

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