skeletonsinherheart

[skeletonsinherheart]

It hasn't happened yet, but it's fast approaching. And I'm trying to prepare myself for his death and what that will mean once he's gone. That he is going to die without ever saying sorry. Without looking me in the eyes and owning the way he hollowed me out like I was a house they never planned to live in, and the way she always let him, as though pretending those moments were invisible to her. There will be no note, no last gasped confession, no cracked voice trembling with regret. Just gone. Just silence, like they always were when I needed something gentle. Just a cold, sudden ending for a life that already left me bleeding in chapters. And everyone else will mourn him like they were whole. Like he wasn't the storm that tore through my nervous system, year after year. Like he didn’t plant landmines in my psyche and call it “parenting.”

I’m supposed to grieve, they say. I know my mother expects us to. But what is there to grieve when the loss already happened long before the body gave out? When I spent my childhood mourning a mother or father that was alive but never safe. Never soft. Never proud of me unless I bent myself into something unrecognizable. He will be dead, and with him will go any hope of reckoning, of apology, of finally seeing some version of love that didn’t come with bruises you can’t show in daylight. And now I’m left holding both the absence of and the weight of everything they both did, and no one wants to hear about the second part. They want tidy grief. They want eulogies and forgiveness like I didn’t have to fight for my own sanity under their roof.

Closure is a myth they sold us in therapy brochures. There is no closure when the wound is still open, still pulsing with all the names he never learned to call me by — like worthy. Like innocent. Like child. I am left to mother the parts of me they both shattered. To raise my own broken self in the echo of his cruelty, and my mother's resounding silence. And even in death, they will still manage to make it about them. Still manage to leave me standing in a room full of people crying for the monster I barely survived, while I stay quiet. While I shrink into the wallpaper. While my grief gets edited out for not being palatable.

I don’t want to forgive them. I want to scream. I want someone to tell me it’s okay that my sadness is laced with rage. That I don’t miss the person they were, but the parent I never got. That I’m still trying to scrape their voice out of my head every time I try to love myself. Each time I had to come up with another reason to not leave this world behind because it would hurt those left behind. That maybe their death doesn’t set me free, it just makes the prison quieter. And even silence can be deafening when it’s filled with everything they never said.

[skeletonsinherheart]

I came into this world not through a doorway, but dragged in by the collar into chaos wrapped in lullabies of screaming.

My first language was violence.

My lullabies were the ricochet of rage, and my older years still bear the metallic taste of walking on eggshells sharp enough to bleed.

They didn’t raise me—

they broke me into shape.

And when I grew tall enough to outrun the shadows of my youth, life handed me new kinds of knives—

and told me to swallow them.

I have become an elegy made flesh.

A walking eulogy.

A requiem with a pulse.

Loss has tattooed itself across every era of my existence.

Etched itself into the bark of my bones,

ever present and lasting and longing for the succession of the coming tragedies I was always meant to suffer,

prophecies of pain long set in motion, and also in stone.

I remember a time where I had allowed myself to burn in a faraway hell under a man who's evil masqueraded as love so convincingly that I only finally saw and felt the flames to see the fire,

and the man

for what he truly was after this one terrible night -- wherein he intentionally left me vulnerable,

and completely alone.

and was then subsequently invaded,

violated,

infected,

by a man he called friend. He staunchly refused to come to my aid,

and then blamed me for it in the end.

In a single night I finally I clawed my way out of the mouth of that pit of horrors where I had remained far too long,

and the moment the dawn broke, and I heard the engine of my savior just outside the window,

I ran from that place, and for the first time with the means to escape,

and to finally flee that wretched for good,

but eventually landing back at the only sanctuary I had with nowhere else to go.

Home.

For me home was just one of several hells in my life where I had spent my life building walls around my soul

callouses that enveloped my heart,

hoping to be granted enough time and strength to allow me flee this one too, in time.

I knew I had chosen to return to this place, though I had no choice,

but I knew that I had chosen the lesser of two hells -- this time with my own space and nothing but the hope for the chance that I might be able to heal,

breathe,

or just to be

even if only for a little while, if it came to it.

If nothing else, I knew I had fled here bringing the only things in the world that mattered to me then --

Just these two tiny little angels made of fur, whiskers, and unconditional love.

I knew that was enough, they were enough to help me survive being back here until I found a way to fly away,

to put this hell behind me too.

But in escaping one hell,

Unknowingly I brought myself face to face with an even greater horror,

one that had not yet come to pass.

Mere months had passed since I had fled back home. The lesser of two hells I had called it.

And then one day, in a single instant, I learned that I had known nothing of true hell until the moment I watched helplessly as my entire universe became an open casket with walls.

My apartment—

my only sanctuary,

my stitched-together heaven

of warm fur and second chances—

went up in flames.

Smoke thick with memory.

Walls weeping fire.

And inside…

they screamed.

My animals... my companions—my babies

burned alive.

I stood paralyzed, catatonic on the gravel

held hostage by grief,

watching their tiny silhouettes writhe

behind infernos I could not enter.

I will never unsee that.

I will never be clean again.

And just when I thought the world couldn’t unravel me further,

death got creative.

--

My best friend.

My platonic soulmate. The other side of my coin.

The one tether that kept me from drifting into oblivion.

Gone.

Car crushed like a soda can beneath a giant’s foot.

Twisted metal mausoleum.

The firemen had to cut their bodies—their bodies—

from what used to be a car and became a coffin.

I still hear the sirens when there are none.

Still smell the oil and blood.

Still writhe and cry in my sleep as I dream of their last breath caught in the throat of a machine.

His death wasn’t peaceful.

It was punishment.

And I’m still doing the sentence

while the one who killed them still walks free.

Then came another baby—

the soft one, the one who curled beside me

when I cried into voids no one else dared to fill.

She ran into the night and didn’t come back.

I found her the next morning—

what was left.

Her insides on the outside,

as even in death, the world had to gut me visually.

I picked up her stiff frozen body with hands that still haven’t stopped shaking.

Every time I heal,

the world reopens the wound

with surgical precision.

Then came the betrayal of a man I gave eight years to.

Eight years of loyalty

undone in the scroll of his phone.

Another woman’s name, another woman’s laugh

in the inbox of the man who swore fidelity.

He didn’t cheat with his body—

he did it with intimacy,

with secrets.

With “harmless” messages he went out of his way to erase and send out of sight

drenched in harm.

And just when I thought the universe had wrung me dry—

my job.

Seven years.

Seven years of blood, sweat,

and belief that maybe I had found a second home.

Fired.

No reason.

No warning.

Just erased.

Like I was a chalk drawing

on the sidewalk before a storm.

They knew I was already falling.

They watched.

And they pushed.

Friends?

Gone.

Ghosts wearing familiar faces.

One by one,

they evaporated into the ether—

blocking me out of existence

without eulogy, without justification.

And the final nail—

him.

Not my lover anymore,

but still always my person.

My safe place in human form.

The last name in my phone I always trusted to answer.

Gone.

Vanished.

Because someone else saw me as a threat—

and because she had since brought a child into this world, he immediately saw me as expendable.

After all, who could compare to that.

But he didn’t even say goodbye.

I didn't get to say goodbye, more than once. Both screamed out into the void never to reach the ears that will never hear them.

Now I live in a silence

so loud it’s deafening.

I sleep in nightmares

and wake up exhausted from dreams.

I haven’t thought this hard about not being alive since I was a teenager

praying to gods I didn’t believe in

to make it all just stop.

The thoughts come like whispers now:

Wouldn’t it be easier to disappear?

Wouldn’t it be quieter in the dirt?

I don’t want to die.

I just want peace.

But I’m starting to wonder

if death is the only landlord who’ll let me rest.

I am shattered.

Not broken—

demolished.

Not empty—

but filled with ghosts who talk in riddles.

And no one knocks anymore.

No one calls.

The people I would have taken bullets for

handed me the gun

and told me to pull the trigger myself.

So if I go silent,

know this:

It wasn’t sudden.

It wasn’t impulsive.

It was the slowest kind of suicide—

the one where you keep living out of habit.

Or because you cannot bear the guilt of the pain you know you'd leave behind.

The kind where your spirit leaves long before your body does.

And I am so, so tired of being alive in a world that keeps insisting

I was never meant to survive it.

[skeletonsinherheart]

I am angry. I want to break things.

[skeletonsinherheart]

[skeletonsinherheart]

[skeletonsinherheart]

[skeletonsinherheart]

[skeletonsinherheart]

“You should never bear the weight of the conditions that have bound and burdened me my entire life. I am so deeply apologetic for these circumstances I am not yet strong enough to change. They are as unforgiving as they are inevitable. So, I understand your leaving before your stay, your going before your arrival. Perhaps in a different time, I could be what we both wish I was.”

— “Catch-22″ remnant-thoughts

[skeletonsinherheart]

[skeletonsinherheart]

[skeletonsinherheart]

[skeletonsinherheart]

For anyone who gives a shit

🖤

I'll be 9 years sober in a few weeks.

[skeletonsinherheart]

[skeletonsinherheart]

Moonbows

A moonbow, also known as a lunar rainbow or white rainbow, is a rainbow created by moonlight rather than sunlight. It's formed when light from the moon refracts and reflects off water droplets, like those in rain or mist, creating a visible arc of light in the sky. Moonbows are generally fainter and less colorful than regular rainbows, and they are much rarer due to the need for specific conditions like a full or near-full moon, clear skies, and dark skies.

[skeletonsinherheart]

𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡. 𝐼𝑡'𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝐼 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒 ...

— said the vampire 🥀

[skeletonsinherheart]

"But they were not living, thought Harry: They were gone. The empty words could not disguise the fact that his parents' moldering remains lay beneath snow and stone, indifferent, unknowing. And tears came before he could stop them, boiling hot then instantly freezing on his face, and what was the point in wiping them off or pretending? He let them fall, his lips pressed hard together, looking down at the thick snow hiding from his eyes the place where the last of Lily and James lay, bones now, surely, or dust, not knowing or caring that their living son stood so near, his heart still beating, alive because of their sacrifice and close to wishing, at this moment, that he was sleeping under the snow with them."

[skeletonsinherheart]