Brie Nicole Inked

I am trying in the way dying stars still burn. Violently. Beautifully. Long after collapse has already begun.

Every morning I gather the shattered glass of myself with trembling hands. Force breath into ruined lungs. Stitch my name back into my skin like it still belongs there. The world keeps asking me to become softer while life gnaws through me like winter through hollow wood. And I keep saying yes. Yes. Even as my spirit drips from my mouth in exhausted little prayers. Even as grief fattens itself on everything tender inside me.

Hope has become a thin animal lately. Ribbed. Starving. Crawling wounded through the wreckage of my chest. I try to cradle it but my hands shake too much. I try to feed it light but all I have left are dim things. Motel-sign flickers, almosts, the last match in a flooded house. Sometimes I think hope looks most honest when it is barely alive.

There are nights where sorrow settles over me like black water. Slow. Suffocating. Sacred. I lie awake listening to my heartbeat stumble through the dark like a lost child knocking on locked doors. The ceiling above me feels infinite. Merciless. And I wonder how many times a person can unmake themselves trying to survive a world that keeps confusing endurance for worthiness.

I am so tired of carrying entire hurricanes behind my ribs while pretending I am only rain.

Something inside me is breaking quietly now. Not all at once. Worse. Petal by petal. Thread by thread. A slow unraveling. The kind you do not notice until you reach for yourself and come back holding only smoke. I can feel my softness hardening at the edges. Feel bitterness circling me like wolves around a wounded thing. And still. Still, there is some brutal part of me that keeps crawling toward tomorrow with blood in its mouth and prayer in its teeth.

Maybe that is all hope ever was.

Not brightness.
Not miracles.
Not salvation.

Just this.
The unbearable act of dragging your ruined body through the dark
and calling it survival anyway.