Brie Nicole Inked

The memories don’t come back whole. They splinter, jagged and uneven, cutting through me in flashes I never asked to keep. A smell, a sound, the way the light bends at a certain hour. And suddenly I am there again, not as I was, but as something distorted, something unfinished. I remember hands before I remember faces. I remember the feeling of leaving before I remember why I had to go. It’s never the full story, just fragments; like broken glass I keep trying to piece together with bleeding fingers, as if making it whole would finally make it hurt less.

There are moments that feel too sharp to belong to the past. They sit just beneath my skin, pulsing, alive, refusing to settle into something quiet or distant. I try to name them, to file them away into something sensible, but they resist—they shift, they blur, they come back wrong. Laughter echoes where there should be silence. Silence stretches where there should have been love. I don’t trust what I remember, and I don’t trust what I’ve forgotten even more.

Sometimes I think the worst part isn’t the pain. It’s the gaps. The missing pieces that feel like they should mean something, but don’t. Like walking into a room and knowing something happened there, something important, but all that’s left is the residue, the aftertaste. I search for it anyway. I always do. I circle back, over and over, like if I look long enough, hard enough, the memory will turn and face me properly.

But it never does.

Instead, it flickers. Half-formed, half-lost; pulling me under in pieces. And I am left holding what remains: a voice without a body, a goodbye without a beginning, a feeling that never learned how to end.