strangementalitycrown

[strangementalitycrown]

I walk alone through streets that feel older than time,

where cobblestones remember more than I can bear to carry. Every shadow brushes against me like a secret I was never told, and I wonder if I belong here, or if I’m just passing through. The air tastes of wine and smoke, of something heavy, something raw— and in it I hear myself, the restless beat inside my chest, half hunger, half prayer. I’ve never trusted love to be gentle. It comes sharp, leaves bruises where hands once lingered, carves lines no one else can see. And still I go on searching— for a glance that stays, for a voice that pulls me closer, for a truth that doesn’t dissolve at dawn. In Trastevere I find nothing, and yet everything— the ache, the fire, the quiet promise

[strangementalitycrown]

“You can’t be in pain on a good day”

A good day — or no. Still, I have spent a day dwelling in a body that does not know my name. Each breath is borrowed, each joint a lock I never made a key for. I sit, unmoving, unseen, unfeeling, a phantom touching shadows. My eyes hunger for reflection, but find only unimportant noise and a silence that wraps around the ribs like wrong fabric sewn too tight. Its a good day — I say it again, like an actor rehearsing a name that’s never been theirs.

But inside,

I am still just a guest

in the architecture of someone else’s

unfinished prayer.

[strangementalitycrown]

Dad asks if it’s because I’m not okay.

If something happened.

If there’s a reason I became this.

He asks it like he’s ready

to fix it with a steady hand

and a name for the wound.

He wants a reason. A cause. Something he can blame. Someone, even. But there is no clean villain. No sharp edge he can dull with a fathers love. Just a sadness that doesn’t ask for permission. I can’t give him the truth- that the bad day never stopped happening, that it still crawls under my skin. So I say I’m fine. I say “it was just a bad day.” He nods, relieved, like he’s tucked me back to safety in bed, and the danger I was afraid of, from under the bed, had gone quiet. And I let him believe it.

[strangementalitycrown]

They say it’s for attention—

but it grinds the soul down to a wet, shaking whisper. It’s not spectacle. It’s survival. It’s choosing what won’t kill you today. Dilated pupils. Skin so sore even air bruises it. I lie— say the mess on the pavement is just spilled coffee, not the acid stink of what my body couldn’t keep down. You keep talking. Academic strategies. Efficient frameworks. And I nod— choking on the bile in my throat, words slipping through my fists like fog. This is not a cry for help. This is a whisper from the pit. It’s aftermath. It’s all the noise I’ve eaten so you could keep speaking like nothing’s burning.

[strangementalitycrown]

I thought I could tie down happiness with the same rope I once imagined around my neck. She took it gently from my hands

and tied it to a tree branch.

Made it into a swing.

“It’s good to see you’re doing better,” she said, as I leaned back, the wind catching me instead of the weight. I thought the rope would end me. She showed me it could hold me differently— not as an escape, but as a return. And for the first time, the air beneath my feet felt like a promise instead of a fall.

[strangementalitycrown]

I want to be good

—not just in the way I act, but in the quiet places where I lean on the couch. I want my soul to be something soft, something clean, something that doesn’t recoil from its own reflection. The thought that there could be something growing silently inside me—some coldness, some cruelty I didn’t notice taking root—it fills me with dread. I don’t care to be perfect. I don’t even need to be whole. I just need to know that what lives within me is still aching to be kind. I want to be the sort of person whose absence would be mourned not for what I gave, but for how I made others feel. Not heavy. Not afraid. Because in the end, I can survive almost anything—except the quiet knowledge that my soul might be hideous.

[strangementalitycrown]

We talked on the train, somewhere between stops and the hum of other people’s lives. Half-laughing, half-listening, saying nothing until it starts to mean something. She asked how I was. I gave her the usual version - vague and harmless. But somewhere between two tunnels and a flickering overhead light I started slipping into truth. I told her, that I am tired in a way sleep can’t fix. That I drink more than I say. That I carve the noice from my mind to my skin when it gets too much. Like it’s a language only I still speak. And sometimes I wish I could just say fuck it. That I’d have so much more to give if I didn’t spend so much of my life hiding. That I could breathe easier if I was allowed to bleed freely at the dinner table, raw and without pretending or explaining. I let it hang there, like and ugly joke, reckless, fragile, which I can’t take back. I said it all for once. And when I wait for her reply, there is nothing. Just the soft, empty hum of a line gone cold. She didn’t hear a word. The most honest thing I’ve said in months, unheard, unheld. The moment just vanished, a secret lost in static. 

[strangementalitycrown]

I wish to stop.

But there is a voice.

And I insist this will be the final time —

though I am fully aware it is a lie.

The whisper within my mind does not plead. It provokes. It dares me to surrender, to unravel, to confirm every fear I’ve ever had about myself. There are moments I cannot meet my own reflection without a jolt of shame. My wounds do not show. I bleed in silence — in the way I recoil from compassion, in the way I clutch a blade as though it holds truth, in the way I choose conflict because quiet has always felt louder. You ask me to stop? Then silence the voice in my head. Tell it the battle has ended. Tell it I am safe now. Tell it I may breathe without consequence. But it does not listen. And, truthfully, neither do I. So I offer the same assurance once more: This is the last time. Even though it is a lie I have learned to deliver with more conviction than the truth.

[strangementalitycrown]

I arrive just before the light dies. Buzz the door. Pocket the phone. The air is thick, metallic — He’s on the couch, eyes glazed, smoke soft, dangling between calm fingers that usually twitch. His sleeves hide nothing. He doesn’t look at me. Just says, “You’re late.” I’m not. But truth is slippery here — we speak in shadows. He rambles first, words falling like broken teeth. Then the truths come bleeding through: his mother, the drugs, a grin like we’re co-conspirators. He paces. Slurs. Hurls a chair, shatters a glass, calls me names that he doesn't mean.

I don’t flinch. I feel alive, skin stretched tight over nerve. Like I’ve stepped back into my body, raw and alert. His anchor in a sea too dark to name. He bleeds, and something in me hums. I sit with him. With all of it. The wreckage. The haze. The ache. Tending to a wound I’ve never dared touch in myself.

The sky bruises as I drive home. And they call me a professional.

But I am just a child who learned to bleed quietly — and call it care.

[strangementalitycrown]

That’s the funny thing about hope.

No one else can feel if it’s there—only you. So the choice is yours. To cradle it quietly, like a spark in your chest, or to let it fade beneath the weight of doubt. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t beg. It waits—soft, stubborn, It doesn’t scream to be kept alive. It just waits. Like a stray dog outside the door— not barking, just looking in. And you can let it in, feed it, or walk away and pretend you never saw it.

[strangementalitycrown]

I got a devil on my shoulder saying he is holy, saying, “This is the only way to feel whole, see?” He whispers like prayer, soft, sacred, pulling me back to the bottle, the blade, the break. He wears light like a halo, but his hands are stained. He says, “Come home, it’s easier here— no questions, no shame, just numbness, just flame.” And some nights, I believe him. Some nights, I crave the silence he wraps around my skin like a shroud or a friend. But I remember the mornings— how he laughs when I’m bleeding, when I’m begging, when I’m breaking just to feel something like peace. I’m tired of altars made of broken glass. I want mercy that doesn’t cost my body. I want to hear a voice that doesn’t lead me to disappear. I got a devil on my shoulder saying he is holy— and it is difficult not to listen.

[strangementalitycrown]

my heart bleeds through my shirt. It’s not dramatic, not like anything loud, but quietly. like a drip that never stops. no one sees it, but I feel it all the time. in my shoulders, my chest, in the way my voice breaks for no reason. I say it’s normal. I say: I just didn’t sleep well. but that’s a lie. sadness leaks. it seeps out of me, like smoke from a burning edge. it clings to my clothes, to the scent of my days, to the answers I don’t give. sometimes I try to hold it in. tie it down with words, with silence, but the thread always snaps. and I’m there again with my hands full of something I don’t know where to put. I walk around with it like a stain, a dark circle across my chest, that won’t dry, won’t fade, just stays.

[strangementalitycrown]

A stranger says he’s proud of his open wounds, wears it as the only honest thing in his life, like a scar he refuses to hide. The rest is smoke — lies drifting lightly around him, slipping into conversation, filling the silence with something that resembles truth, but never is. He speaks in circles, hides behind phrasing, but the hurting — it stands without explanation, without a filter, like a single clear note in a cacophony of evasion. And that’s why you believe it. Not because he says it’s there, but because everything else crumbles, and only the pain remains.

[strangementalitycrown]

a child who grows up craving pain will always find a way to chase it— in slammed doors, in silence that stings louder than words, in nails against skin, as if digging deep could uncover something real. he learns to smile without showing teeth, to hide scars like secrets stitched in sleeves, because pain, at least, makes sense.

A boy built from bruises can only learn to hold pain.

[strangementalitycrown]

Unreliable, dangerous, and dull-minded. A childhood mistake, indefensible and ridiculous. The words fall from the cutting bite. Teeth crack under the pressure. The blood only tastes sweet when it’s my own.

Look at me.

A wounded, whimpering dog.

Help me. I dont know why I bite.

I stand in the doorway to the kitchen. Let the feeling of loving life carve its depth across my shoulders, while I pretend not to see the alcohol on top of the cupboard. Dust wanders—except from my trail of broken days.

[strangementalitycrown]

I try not to let myself look forward to anything—expectations for the future are haunted grief.

My steps drag across the wounding asphalt as if it means something,

and I know I’ll fall and scrape my knee.

[strangementalitycrown]

You call me a morphine thief but you fall for my intoxicated touch. You shout I steal peace, but your eyes beg for one more high when my fingers blur the world and soothe what you’re too scared to feel. You call me poison yet you drink me like salvation— and in your collapse

I am both your ache

and your relief.