eighteen
Eighteen was a borrowed coat, stitched from expectations too large for my shoulders, yet I wore it, through every season anyway. Its pockets grew heavy. With test papers creased at the edges. With sleepless mornings that smelled of burnt coffee. With names I no longer can take. With dreams, reduced to ash, that still managed to stain my fingertips. I learned to measure time not by sunsets,but By deadlines. By countdowns. By the distance between one breakdown and the next. The sun became a stranger who only knew me through my bedroom window. I mistook survival for ambition. Silence for healing. Exhaustion for something to be proud of. Entire versions of me left quietly. Some wearing someone else's goodbye. Some swallowed by grief. Some simply dissolved, because one heart cannot house every person it has ever been. Yet spring kept arriving. Not loudly. Just enough green forcing itself through cracked concrete. Just enough light to remind the sky it had not forgotten its own colour. A...