The Night Before

The night before my life started to make sense, I couldn’t breathe.

Not in a dramatic way.

In a quiet way.

The kind where you realise you’ve been living on borrowed air for years and never noticed.

I stood in the kitchen with the lights off, listening to a city that wasn’t even mine anymore.

Every version of me I ever abandoned was there too.

The girl who waited for people who never came.

The one who mistook longing for love.

The one who thought disappearing made her easier to keep.

They didn’t say anything.

They didn’t have to.

I felt something shift under my ribs.

A crack.

A warning.

A beginning.

Grief has a way of choosing you before you choose yourself.

But that night, I didn’t flinch.

I let the past sit in the room with me without trying to fold myself into its shape.

I don’t know if that’s healing.

But it felt like the truth.

And truth is louder than fear.

If you let it.

Sometimes I think that was the moment everything changed.

Not the morning after.

Not my birthday.

On a random Thursday night.

Just me, in the dark, finally realising I wasn’t broken.

I wasn’t waiting.

I wasn’t asking.

I was waking up.

And once you wake up you don’t go back.

The past can knock, but it doesn’t live here anymore.