Brie Nicole Inked

It sits there—small, almost insulting in its persistence—a splinter of light lodged beneath the ribs, where the pressure lives, where the voices stack and stack and stack until breathing feels like a negotiation I’m losing. Expectations press in from every side, heavy-handed, loud with shoulds and almosts and not-enoughs, a constant hum that rattles through bone. I carry them like wet concrete, like something still setting, still deciding what shape I’m allowed to be. And still—still—there is that sliver. Thin as a crack in glass. Flickering. Refusing to go dark even as everything else insists it should.

I try to bury it. God, I try. Under the weight of comparison, under the ache of falling short in ways no one names but everyone sees. It would be easier to let it go, to let the darkness win cleanly instead of this jagged in-between, this almost-belief that cuts more than it comforts. But it won’t stay buried. It shifts. It breathes when I don’t. It whispers—not loudly, never loudly—but enough to interrupt the spiral: what if this isn’t all you are? What if the pressure isn’t proof of failure but of something still fighting to exist?

And I hate it for that. For daring to suggest survival where I only feel strain. For threading warmth through places I’ve already declared cold and finished. Because hope, in this state, is not gentle—it is invasive. It pries open clenched fists, forces air into collapsed lungs, insists on space where there is none. It does not erase the weight; it sharpens it, makes me aware of just how much I’m carrying and how badly I want to put it down without disappearing with it.

But it stays. That sliver. Unwelcome, unyielding. A quiet defiance lodged deep in the wreckage of expectation. And maybe—maybe—that is the beginning of something. Not relief. Not yet. Just the smallest, most stubborn refusal to be completely crushed.