Brie Nicole Inked

Memories. Or perhaps the ache for something I thought once existed. A mirage of happier days, softened by distance and desperation. I find myself yearning for a time when my heart was not splintered into a thousand quiet fractures, when I didn’t have to rehearse the lie of being okay, when the words I’m good carried truth instead of exhaustion. But the longer I look back, the more that version of the past dissolves beneath scrutiny.

I search for a moment when my heart was whole, and I cannot find one. Not a single season untouched by the slow, familiar grief of knowing I was never the first choice. Never the one someone fought for. Never enough to be chosen without hesitation. From the moment I arrived into this world and every moment after, I learned my place was conditional, kept close for convenience, set aside when something better appeared. When it truly mattered, I was always replaceable.

So the memories I ache for are not memories at all. They are illusions, delicately constructed out of longing and survival. I wrapped pain in nostalgia, turned endurance into something almost beautiful, just to make it bearable. I told myself there was once a time when I was unbroken because admitting otherwise felt too heavy to carry.

But the truth is sharper than that fantasy. What I miss is not a past that was kind to me, it is the idea that such a past could have existed. The belief that somewhere, somehow, I was once chosen without question. That my presence was not provisional. That my heart did not have to earn its place.

Those imagined memories are coated in deception, yes but not malice. They are born from a human need to believe that pain was not always the default. And perhaps that longing says less about what I lost, and more about what I still deserve.