Brie Nicole Inked

I have learned
how to romanticize my own silence.
How to sit inside dim rooms with aching hands
and call it peace
instead of loneliness.

Because solitude,
True solitude
Does not sink its teeth into me the way people do.

People arrive like beautiful disasters.
All warm mouths and trembling promises.
They cup your bruised face gently
While quietly searching for somewhere to place their emptiness.
And I have always been so willing
To become a landfill for other people’s grief.

I have let them carve homes into my ribcage.
Let them drink from me until my laughter sounded thin.
Until I could no longer recognize myself outside of what I was providing.

There is a particular violence
In being loved only for your usefulness.

A slow hemorrhaging.
A disappearing act performed in soft lighting.

You wake up one morning exhausted in places sleep cannot reach.
You realize they never memorized your soul.
Only the way your hands kept rescuing them from drowning.

So now I choose empty spaces.
Choose unanswered phones.
Choose evenings spent alone with my own weather.

And yes sometimes the quiet is unbearable.
Sometimes it stretches so wide I swear I could dissolve inside it.

But even the heaviest silence has never manipulated me.
Never twisted my tenderness into obligation.
Never made me feel guilty for bleeding too slowly.

I would rather sit alone with the ghosts clawing at my chest.
Than keep offering my body as shelter to people who arrive starving
And leave before learning my favorite color.

So let them call me distant.
Cold.
Too much.
Too difficult to reach.

I am no longer breaking myself apart to make others comfortable.

There is mercy
In eating alone.
In walking away.
In becoming unreachable to the mouths that only open when they need something from you.

And maybe this solitude is not emptiness after all.

Maybe it is the first honest thing I have ever given myself.