u/LionKingHoe

There are memories
that do not leave the body.
They settle into it.
Into the shoulders.
Into the stomach.
Into the instinct to apologize
before speaking.
Into the unbearable panic
when someone takes too long to answer a text.

People call it abandonment issues
like it is some small behavioral inconvenience,
some harmless overreaction.
They do not understand
that some of us learned very young
that love could vanish mid-sentence.
That safety could disappear
between one slammed door
and the next.

I remember my father
through fragments.
Through noise.
My mother wanting something small—
attention, help, tenderness, understanding—
and somehow it becoming violence.
The sound of anger turning physical.
The sound of someone you depend on
becoming someone you fear.

I learned early
that a man could claim to love you
while making you terrified of his footsteps.
And then there were the other houses.
His car outside another woman’s home
like betrayal had become routine enough
to park comfortably in a driveway.
I remember staring at it
trying to understand
how someone could belong to two worlds at once
while his children sat confused in another.
I think part of me is still there sometimes.
Still staring.
Still trying to understand
why we were never enough
to make him stay consistent.
The worst part was never even the leaving.
It was the waiting.
My brother and I sitting by the door,
believing every sound outside
might finally be him.

Hours passing.

Then days.

Then months.

Because I said
I did not want to spend time
with his girlfriend.

And children learn dangerous lessons
from moments like that.

I learned that honesty
could cost me love.
That boundaries
could make people disappear.
That affection was conditional.
That people leave
when you become inconvenient.

And somehow
those lessons followed me into adulthood
like ghosts wearing familiar faces.

Even now,
when someone pulls away slightly,
I feel twelve years old again.
Waiting by the door.
Trying to earn permanence.

My grandmother never looked at me
the way she looked at others.
Some people speak rejection fluently
without ever raising their voice.

You can feel it in hesitation.
In distance.
In the absence of warmth.
There is a particular loneliness
that comes from realizing
you are tolerated
instead of embraced.

And maybe that is why
I spent so much of my life
trying to become exceptional.

Stronger.
Funnier.
Smarter.
More useful.
More beautiful.
More needed.

As though achievement
could somehow compensate
for not feeling chosen naturally.

But the deepest loneliness
came afterward.

After every assault.
After every violation
that left me carrying silence
too heavy for one person.

People always ask why survivors do not speak.

What they mean is:
“Why didn’t you make it easier
for everyone else to understand?”
But how do you explain
that something inside you was shattered
without sounding unbearable?
How do you hand someone
the full weight of your pain
without watching their face change?

So instead
I carried it alone.

Again.
And again.
And again.

And again.
And again.
And again.

And again.
And again.
And again.

And again…

Too many times to count
But I remember every time.

My feelings became oceans
with nowhere safe to go.
Too big to share.
Too sharp to hold inside comfortably.
Every emotion arriving at full volume.

Grief that felt biblical.
Loneliness that felt physical.
Longing so intense
it made my chest ache.

And underneath all of it,
one simple terrifying question:

If people fully saw
how damaged I am,
would they leave too?

So I learned performance.

How to smile correctly.
How to become useful.
How to make other people comfortable
while quietly drowning myself.

Because being wanted
felt safer than being known.

But the truth is
I do not want to spend the rest of my life
being emotionally translated into something smaller
just so others can digest me more easily.

My life is messy.

My grief is messy.

My history is messy.

There are entire nights inside me
that still shake when they remember themselves.

There are wounds
I disguise as personality traits.

There are moments
I still cannot say out loud completely.

And despite all of it—
despite every abandonment,
every betrayal,
every silence,
every hand that hurt instead of held—
there remains inside me
this stubborn, childlike hope
that refuses to die.
The hope that someone someday
will look directly at all of it
and not recoil.
Not leave.
Not minimize it.
Not ask me to become easier.

Just stay.

Because beneath all the trauma,
all the anger,
all the fear of being too much,

I am still just a person
standing quietly at the edge of the world
asking the same thing
I have been asking my entire life:

Please see me.

Please choose me.