I know every detail about every version of herself she has ever been.

I know the 6-year-old version who swallowed her name like a marble, who sat in the back of classrooms with her knees drawn up, thinking if she held herself small enough, still enough, maybe they wouldn’t see her. I know the 9-year-old who didn’t believe in God but prayed anyway, who thought love was what happened when someone stayed, even when she cried too hard at the wrong times.

There’s the 13-year-old who tried on other people’s laughter like clothes that didn’t fit, her tongue sharp and aching in the mirror. And the 15-year-old who learned silence like a second language, fluent in walking home in the rain without saying a word about it.

I know her, and I know her ghost. She’s always dying in my chest. Every version of her burns quietly in the back of my throat—ashes, whispers, a girl with her fingers pressed to the edges of the world, trying to keep it from crumbling.

She’s a thousand heartbreaks in one. She’s the night you stay up too late and every hour feels like a wound. She’s the cigarette you don’t finish, the voicemail you don’t delete.

I know her at 16, staring at her reflection, trying to scrape something real out of the blur. And at 18, standing at the edge of her future with fists full of past selves, wondering which ones to keep, which ones to let go.

She is every version of a mistake. Every version of a girl who thought she was too much, too little, not enough. She is the paper cut you don’t notice until it stings.

I know her, and I love her like an apology. Like a grief so big it has to become something else. She’s not here anymore, but she’s everywhere I look. She’s every shadow and every shard, every broken piece of a mirror that never quite showed her face the way she hoped it would.

And still, she’s the only one who’s ever understood me.

She came in a coat too thin for the wind— said it tasted like rust. He laughed, said it wasn’t the taste of the wind but the city bleeding through her.

Her camera clicked like insects, sharp, sudden, unnecessary. He walked beside her, hands in his pockets, his silhouette the quiet echo of buildings she tried to capture but couldn’t.

“Do you live here?” she asked. Her tongue like a foreign coin. “Depends,” he said, his voice loose, like a shirt missing buttons. “On what?” “On where you think here is.”

They stood still— her lenses pointing up, his eyes burning at the ground. She collected the beauty of everything he had forgotten to see: the cracks in the pavement where weeds dared to live, the graffiti soft with rain. He noticed her noticing, as if for the first time hearing someone name a ghost he had carried so long it became furniture.

She told him about her city, one with too many stars and not enough shadows. He told her about his, a place so used to losing it forgot how to stop.

Her stories unraveled like ribbon; his were frayed rope. But somehow the knots held— in the spaces between her laughter and his silence, in the way their steps began to fall into rhythm without either noticing.

Later, when the streetlights flickered like apologies, he showed her a corner no guidebook knew. A small door covered in flyers, a room inside where a piano breathed like it wanted to drown.

He didn’t tell her it used to be his mother’s place. He didn’t tell her how the music felt like stitching over a wound that never quite healed. She didn’t ask. She only listened. And for once, he wasn’t alone in the song.

When she left, she didn’t say goodbye. The word felt too heavy for something so delicate. But she pressed her camera into his hands and said, “Keep it. You see things I don’t.”

And when she was gone, he walked the city, alone again— except this time, everything looked like a picture.

Who are we? Who are we, really? When the lights fade, when the audience blinks away, when the mirror sighs its loneliness and the applause never comes— who’s left?

We are the quiet shuffle of socks against cold tile floors, the hum of a refrigerator trying to keep alive what little we have left. We are breath held too long, a sharp inhale of “Did I lock the door?” We are the ones who say, “It’s fine,” to no one, and mean it less every time.

They say your shadow only follows you in the light. But what if it dances in the dark? What if it’s not a shadow but a second self, stretching, aching, spilling its secrets into the soft bowl of night?

We are messy hands, tearing open bags of chips like they owe us something. We are the notes in the margins of books that no one else will read. The doodles, the scratches, the ink bleeding through. We are the grin after the bad joke, the smirk of “I’m so dumb,” and the silence after.

Who are we when no one is watching? We are a single sock, orphaned in the dryer. We are the playlist we’ll never share, the one with the song that makes us cry— but only at 2 a.m., when the moon is drunk and the stars don’t care.

We are the truth, but only in whispers, only in fragments. A memory caught in the throat. A laugh that turns into a sob mid-flight. A heart beating for someone who’ll never know.

But maybe—just maybe— we’re also the fire. Not the kind that burns for show, not the fireworks, not the candle on someone else’s birthday cake. No.

We are the ember that refuses to die. The flame we cup between our hands like a secret, like a promise. We are the ones who try, again and again, even when it hurts. We are our own witness.

Who are we when no one is watching? We are infinite. We are raw. We are beautiful in the way a scar is beautiful— proof that something tried to break us, and we said, “No. Not yet.”

His name was Archie. A little mutt with a coat that was more patchwork than anything, the kind of dog you never asked for but somehow ended up with anyway. His ears were too big for his face, and he limped when he walked, dragging one back paw like the weight of the world was just a little too much for him, a little too much for anyone. I swear, sometimes I could hear him sighing. It wasn’t a dog’s sigh—it was a human one, the kind that tells you nothing’s ever going to get better.

He’d look up at me like he knew. Like maybe he knew I didn’t want to get out of bed some days, or how it felt when your lungs can’t hold the air in long enough. I think he knew I hated mirrors. I think he hated them too. He’d avoid them, like he knew that the way the light hit his scruffy fur and the way his body seemed too fragile for its own skin was something he couldn’t fix.

The nights were the worst. That’s when I’d find him curled up on the floor, staring at the door, waiting for someone to come home who would never show up. His eyes always looked the same, like they had seen enough of this place to know it wasn’t home—just a house, just a holding cell for broken things. But he didn’t have anywhere else to go. I guess neither did I.

I’d sit there with him. And it was quiet, but the kind of quiet that made you hear the crack of your bones and the empty space inside your ribs. You ever sit in a room so long that your own skin feels like someone else’s? That was me, and that was Archie too, both of us pretending to wait for something that would never come. He’d get up, stretch his body out like it hurt to do it, and then lay back down. His fur would get matted from the spots he liked to sleep in, the places where the floor felt too cold for a body to stay in one piece.

I used to think there was something tragic about dogs, the way they were always just trying to make you happy, even when their hearts were falling apart. But Archie didn’t try to make me happy. He just sat with me, like he knew. And maybe that was worse.

We both lost weight, me from staying in bed for days at a time and him because his stomach couldn’t keep anything down. I swear there was a point when he looked thinner than I did, and I used to wonder if maybe his bones had grown too heavy for his skin, the way mine did too.

Sometimes I’d sit there, watching him, wishing we could just escape together, but we were trapped in the same skin, the same house, the same life that made us both so damn tired. One day, he didn’t get up. He just lay there, curled in on himself, still and quiet, the way a body learns how to be when it’s too tired to keep fighting.

It’s funny how grief can settle in like that, slow and choking, so quiet you don’t even know it’s happening until it’s already done.

They say pets reflect their owners. They say you can look at them and see a version of yourself, some kind of parallel universe where maybe you turned out different, maybe you didn’t. But I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe Archie and I were just two things trying to survive the same damn way. Two things trying to hold on to something when everything else was falling apart.

He didn’t die. He just stopped moving. And I didn’t cry, not at first. I just sat there beside him, rubbing his fur the way I used to when he was alive, waiting for something to break. Something did. But it wasn’t in him.

It was in me.

The horses in the stable went wild; they knew of the coming storm. Their hooves slammed against the wooden planks of their stalls, splinters falling like brittle rain. Snorting, rearing, the whites of their eyes gleamed in the flickering oil lamp light. The sky outside had been sullen all day, the kind of gray that felt more like a bruise than a color, and now the air reeked of copper and wet dirt.

But the storm wasn’t in the sky—not yet.

I stood at the stable door, leaning on the frame, feeling the cold wind pull at my collar like a hand. My cigarette was a stub now, the ash crumbling into the mud. She hadn’t come yet, but I knew she would. She always came when the storms did.

Her name was Isolde. Like the kind of name someone gives you when they expect you to break things. She’d told me once she was named after a dead queen who drank poison for love. I told her she drank too much herself, and she smiled like the devil had kissed her cheek. I don’t know what it was about her—if it was her or just the shadow of her, the weight of her presence that made everything feel like the first line of a murder confession.

The horses felt it too. She was the storm in their blood, the one they couldn’t outpace.

I heard her before I saw her. The click of boots on gravel. Then she was there, a shape cut from the night, hair wild, eyes sharper than glass. She wasn’t dressed for the cold, but Isolde never seemed to notice the things that could hurt her. “They’re restless,” she said, nodding toward the horses.

“They know you’re here.” My voice came out rough, like bark peeling from a tree.

She stepped closer, and the wind carried the smell of her—rain and the leather jacket she always wore, the one torn at the sleeve like it had survived a fight with something ancient and mean. She moved like the world owed her space, like every step she took was an apology from the earth.

“I need to ride,” she said, her voice low but steady. There was something in her eyes tonight, something darker than the usual defiance, sharper than her laugh that could cut through bone.

“Ride where?” I asked, though it didn’t matter. She never told me where she went. I never asked because the answers wouldn’t have been enough. The storm wasn’t outside, and it wasn’t coming. It was her, and it had been here all along.

“Anywhere.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Nowhere. Does it matter?”

I wanted to stop her, to say something that would tether her to this moment, to me, but I never knew how. Isolde was like smoke—always slipping through your fingers, always making you choke.

She reached for the reins of the black mare, the wildest of them all, the one no one dared to ride but her. The horse stomped and snorted but didn’t resist. They were kindred spirits, bound by whatever lived in the marrow of storms.

“Don’t go,” I said, though it came out like a whisper, like the last breath of a drowning man.

She swung up into the saddle, her body fluid, her movements sharper than a blade. She looked down at me, her face shadowed and unreadable, the way clouds hide the sun just before lightning strikes.

“Come with me,” she said.

I froze, the words catching in my chest like thorns. I thought of the world outside—vast, endless, cruel. And then I thought of her. She was all those things too.

But I was afraid. Afraid of storms I couldn’t outrun. Afraid of Isolde, of what it would mean to be close enough to touch her but never hold her.

She shook her head like she could see the war in my eyes. “You’re always afraid, aren’t you?”

The words hit like a whip. Before I could answer, she kicked the mare into motion, galloping out into the night. The stable doors swung wide, and the wind roared through, scattering hay and ash.

I stood there as the storm swallowed her whole.

Your love was a moth’s wing pinned to my chest, and every beat— God, it stung. I’d have swallowed the whole moon for you, if only to feel something bigger than the guilt that dripped from your tongue.

We called it love, but it was a bloodletting, your hands always at my throat, mine always somewhere I shouldn’t have reached.

Do you remember the park bench, where you said “forever” like you meant next Tuesday? I smiled and said “me too” because I was too tired to ask what kind of liar you wanted me to be.

Somewhere between your cigarette burns and the bruises I wore like second skin, I started naming the stars after all the ways you could kill me— mercy was never one of them.

And still, I begged for your touch, each kiss a noose tightening— until I forgot the sound of my name and only knew the echo of yours.

What do you do with a love that makes you hate yourself? Do you bury it? Burn it? Write it letters it will never read? I’ve done all three, and still, it lives in my lungs, every breath I take a scream I’ve swallowed whole.

But I’ve learned this much: there’s no such thing as “almost.” There’s only the wreckage of what wasn’t and the ghosts of what could’ve been.

So go. Take your knives. Take your half-empty promises and that grin that could cut glass.

I’ll build a tomb for the girl who loved you— the one who thought she could save you. She’ll rot there quietly, her hands folded in prayer, her mouth full of dirt.

And I’ll walk away this time. Not because I’m strong, but because there’s nothing left.

Farewell, my almost lover.

The first time she met him, the cowgirl was standing on a rotted dock by a gas station that sold neon beer signs and stale coffee. She wasn’t supposed to be there, wasn’t supposed to be off her ranch—daddy always said city folks were trouble—but she’d been running low on reasons to stay put. He wasn’t supposed to be there either. Princes don’t hang around places like this. But here he was, brooding in a leather jacket that didn’t quite fit, smoking a cigarette like he didn’t care that the world was falling apart, or maybe because he did.

“You’re blocking the sun,” she said, tipping her hat back to get a better look. He was tall, too clean to belong here. Like a crow perched on a scarecrow.

“Good thing you look better in the shade,” he shot back, not even turning his head.

She spat into the lake. It was murky, the kind of water that swallowed things. Secrets. Shoes. Women. “You a poet or just an asshole?”

“Both.”

It wasn’t like a spark ignited between them or whatever cheesy thing you see in movies. No, it was more like the slow burn of an old cigarette left in the ashtray—smoldering, acrid, leaving behind a bitterness no amount of gum could chew away.

He was hiding. Not from her, but from everything else. She knew that look—had seen it in the mirror every morning since her mom left a Post-it on the fridge that said, Sorry, can’t do this anymore.

They kept running into each other after that. It didn’t make sense—his world of crystal chandeliers and hers of dirt roads and oil stains—but somehow, the universe kept throwing them together like dice in a losing game.

“You ever get tired of pretending?” she asked one night, her boots dangling off the tailgate of his stupidly expensive truck. He was leaning against the bed, staring up at a sky that didn’t look like it belonged to either of them.

“Pretending what?”

“That you don’t care. About this. About…anything.”

He lit another cigarette, his hands shaking just enough for her to notice. “You ever get tired of pretending you’re not scared shitless of staying where you are?”

That shut her up. Not because he was wrong, but because he was so goddamn right it made her chest ache.

She thought about him when she was alone in the fields, the kind of loneliness that clings to your ribs like tar. He thought about her when the palace halls echoed too loud, when his mother called him a disgrace for the third time that week, when the weight of expectations pressed so hard he thought his lungs might collapse.

Their love wasn’t tender. It wasn’t sweet. It was raw, jagged, like a song played too loud on a busted radio. They fought over everything—how she hated his polished life, how he couldn’t stand her rough edges. But there were moments, too, where the world slipped away, and it was just them. Her hands in his hair. His lips on her collarbone. Breathing in sync, for once.

She told him about the time her brother got drunk and wrecked the tractor. He told her about the first time he realized his father only loved him as an idea, not as a person.

“Do you think we’re broken?” she asked one night, her voice so soft he almost didn’t hear it.

“We were born broken,” he said, and for the first time, she thought maybe he wasn’t lying.

It didn’t end well. It couldn’t. She was too stubborn to leave her land, even if it killed her. He was too trapped to leave his crown, even if it wasn’t his. But for a while, they made the impossible work.

And maybe that’s what love is—two people, trying to hold onto something that was never meant to last.

When she thought of him years later, it wasn’t the fights or the goodbyes that stuck. It was the way he’d looked at her that first night on the dock, like she was the only real thing in a world built on lies.

And maybe, for him, she had been.

December 5th

There was blood on the syringe again. I didn’t clean it. Not this time. I told myself it was the protocol, but in truth, I wanted to keep the memory of him sharp. I wanted the ghost of his heartbeat to linger in the sterile hum of this room. It was too fast—his heart, I mean. Too alive. And the way it faltered when my gloved fingers pressed against his wrist—I could still feel it now, like a tiny bird dying against my palm.

He had a name, of course, but I won’t write it down. Names are traps, and I can’t afford another. He asked me if it would hurt, and I lied to him. Isn’t that what nurses are for? To lie beautifully in white, to promise that needles are just whispers and not fangs. He said okay. He said thank you.

I didn’t expect him to cry.

But when the tears came, I hated how they tasted in the air—salt and something else, like burnt sugar. It reminded me of the nights I spent crying into my pillow when I thought no one could hear me, when I thought being a little girl meant you could break yourself quietly and grow into something beautiful later. But now I know the truth. You don’t grow into something beautiful. You grow into something hollow, something useful. Something that holds people’s pain like it’s your own, and learns to love the weight of it.

I think he loved me. In those last seconds, when his pulse slipped through my fingers like water, I saw it in his eyes. That stupid kind of love people die for. The kind that sinks ships. The kind that empties veins. And I hated him for it. I hated how his love made me feel something again.

I stayed until his skin turned cold, my hand still pressed to his chest like I could convince him to stay. But he didn’t. They never do.

Now, the room feels like it’s collapsing inward. I close my eyes, but all I see is the empty space where his body used to be. I wish I could say I’m lost, but it’s worse than that. I’m exactly where I always end up, and the worst part is how much I belong here.

There’s still blood on the syringe.

And I’m not going to clean it.

You have ninety seconds to hide. If you are found, you die. Good luck.

The voice slithered through the dark like oil spilling over wet pavement. It didn’t echo. It didn’t need to. It planted itself in every crevice of her skull like a root burrowing for water. Marlie froze, her chest a hollow cathedral for the screaming silence that followed. Ninety seconds.

Her feet moved before her brain did, scraping the linoleum of the room she didn’t remember entering. The air smelled like mildew and burnt sugar. Fluorescent lights sputtered, bleeding pale yellow onto the walls, and her shadow staggered like it was drunk. She flung open a door that led to nowhere—a janitor’s closet stuffed with empty shelves and a single rusted mop.

She couldn’t die here. Not like this.

A timer she couldn’t see ticked inside her chest, louder than her heartbeat. Maybe they’d sync up eventually. Maybe she’d find out what happens after the last second. She slammed the closet door shut and ran.

“Why are you running?”

The voice again. It didn’t come from a speaker, but from everywhere, like the walls themselves had grown mouths. Her breath stuttered as she slipped on something slick on the floor. Blood? Water? Both? It didn’t matter. Her knee hit the ground, skin tearing open on the tile, but she clawed her way to her feet and kept going.

“Fuck you,” she hissed at the empty hallway, her voice trembling. Her chest burned like it was filled with splinters. “I’m not dying here. Not like this.”

“You think you deserve to live?”

The hallway stretched longer as she ran. The walls melted into shadows. No end in sight. Behind her, the sound of footsteps. Heavy, deliberate, the kind of sound that belongs to something patient. Something that’s already decided you’re not getting out.

She ducked into a room at random, the door groaning on its hinges as she pressed herself against the wall. Inside, there was nothing but a single chair bolted to the center of the floor.

“You’re wasting time.”

Her stomach churned, and for a moment, she wondered what would happen if she just…stopped. Sat down on the chair and waited. Let it find her. Maybe it would be kinder than running, because the running hurt—her lungs, her legs, her head—all of it screamed for release.

But then, her body spoke for her, buzzing like a live wire: hide. survive. fight.

She slid under the chair, curling into herself, knees pulled tight to her chest. She covered her mouth with both hands, trying to smother the sound of her shallow, terrified breathing.

It was quiet. Too quiet.

Until it wasn’t.

The door creaked open.

She didn’t look. She couldn’t.

“Found you,” it whispered, soft as a kiss.

And then—darkness.

—

When Marlie woke, her body felt like a stone dropped in water, heavy and sinking. She wasn’t dead. That realization crawled over her like a spider, too many legs skittering up her spine. She was lying in a bed now, its sheets starched and clean. The kind of clean that smelled like hospitals and bleach.

Sitting in a chair by her side was a man—or something wearing a man’s skin. His face was all sharp angles, cheekbones carved like threats. His eyes, however, were hollow, like someone had scooped out his soul and left the sockets empty. He smiled.

“Do you want to play again?”

Marlie didn’t answer. She stared at him, her throat too raw for words.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, standing. “Good. I like you.”

He leaned in, close enough that she could smell him—copper and ash and something sweet, like honey rotting in the sun.

“But next time,” he murmured, lips brushing her ear, “try harder.”

And then he was gone.

Marlie stared at the ceiling, her body still and her mind a thunderstorm of broken glass. The voice echoed in her head, over and over again, like a song she couldn’t stop humming.

You have ninety seconds to hide. If you are found, you die. Good luck.

She smiled, lips splitting open like old scars.

“Fuck you,” she whispered to the empty room.

It whispered back: See you soon.

With the night comes darkness, but also stars. And isn’t that the trick? The poison sugar at the rim of the glass. You kiss me like a blade soft enough to beg for, and I let you. Every time.

They warned me about you. That you were the kind of disaster to light cigarettes in the rain, to write love letters to your own shadow and send them unsigned. But I swore I’d never need saving.

I watch the night eat itself in your eyes, dark enough to make a god question His decision to leave us this ruin called desire. You whisper my name like a bruise you can’t stop pressing on. Do you know how long I’ve waited to hear myself sound like something someone might miss?

Every touch is a debt we can’t repay. Every kiss an apology that neither of us means.

I never said I wanted forever, only the falling. The breaking. The gravity of it. And you—oh, you— you’re the kind of black hole that makes even light want to die a little slower.

I tell myself I’ll leave tomorrow, but tomorrow is a thing you’ve burned out of me. You’ve replaced the future with nights like this, where the darkness doesn’t just come— it begs to stay.

And the stars? The stars are only scars. But they’re ours.