To Know Me Is to Leave

To know me is to leave.

That is the first thing you should understand about me.

People do not always leave immediately. Some of them stay long enough to make me believe they might be different. They sit beside me and ask questions. They trace the edges of my silence as though they are genuinely curious about what lives inside it. They tell me I am safe with them. They tell me I can speak. They promise they are not afraid of the darkness.

And for a moment, I believe them.

I open the door carefully.

I let them see one ruined room at a time.

I show them the walls where old words still hang like smoke. I show them the places where love was supposed to live but never arrived. I show them the child inside me who still sits awake at night, listening for footsteps, trying to determine whether they belong to someone coming to save her or someone coming to hurt her.

At first, people call my pain beautiful.

They say I am deep. They say I feel things differently. They say there is something haunting about the way I speak, as though suffering has made me interesting. They romanticize the sadness while it is still distant enough not to inconvenience them.

But then they begin to understand that the sadness is not poetry.

It is not an aesthetic.

It is not a beautiful bruise beneath soft lighting.

It wakes up with me. It eats with me. It sleeps beside me. It sits quietly between us when you ask why I suddenly went silent. It tells me not to trust your kindness because kindness has always had an expiration date.

And once people realize that knowing me means knowing all of this, they begin to step backward.

Slowly at first.

Then all at once.

To know me is to leave because I do not know how to be known without becoming afraid. I do not know how to be loved without waiting for the love to change its mind. I do not know how to rest inside someone’s hands without wondering when those hands will loosen around me.

I watch for the smallest signs.

A shorter reply.

A different tone.

A sigh that lasts a second too long.

The way your eyes move away from mine when I tell you something honest.

I notice everything because there was a time when noticing everything was the only way I could survive.

I learned to read rooms before I learned to understand myself. I learned the weight of footsteps, the meaning of slammed doors, the danger hidden inside ordinary silence. I learned when to disappear. I learned when to become useful. I learned when to become so quiet that even my own pain could not find me.

People call me observant now.

They do not know it was born from fear.

They call me independent.

They do not know nobody came when I cried.

They call me strong.

They do not know strength was never something I chose.

It was something forced into my hands while I was still too young to carry it.

I have imagined my own funeral more than I have imagined my wedding day.

Not because I have always wanted to die, but because death has always felt easier to believe in than forever.

Forever requires trust.

Forever requires the foolish courage to believe that someone can see all of you and still remain.

Death asks for nothing except an ending.

I have imagined the flowers people would bring. I have wondered who would cry and who would stand at the back of the room pretending they knew me better than they did. I have imagined people saying I was kind. Quiet. Complicated. Troubled. That I always seemed a little distant, as though part of me was living somewhere else.

I wonder whether they would feel guilty.

I wonder whether anyone would remember the moments I tried to tell them I was not okay without using those exact words.

The unanswered messages.

The forced laughter.

The way I said I was tired when what I meant was that existing had become unbearably heavy.

The way I stopped asking people to stay because I could no longer survive hearing them say they would and watching them leave anyway.

Would they finally understand me when there was nothing left to understand?

Would they look at my stillness and realize how hard I had worked to stay alive inside a life that never felt gentle?

Perhaps that is why I imagine funerals more easily than weddings.

At my funeral, nobody can abandon me.

Nobody can promise forever and then discover I am too difficult to love.

Nobody can reach the most wounded part of me and decide it is not worth saving.

At my funeral, leaving would finally be expected.

But a wedding?

A wedding is built on the hope that someone will remain.

And hope has always frightened me more than grief.

Grief is familiar. I know its habits. I know how it enters a room and makes itself comfortable. I know how it changes the taste of food and the weight of mornings. I know how it turns memories into weapons and ordinary songs into open wounds.

Hope is crueler.

Hope gives you something to lose.

Sometimes I speak to God as though He is sitting in the room with me.

Other times, I speak to Him as though He has been absent for years.

Why are You making me suffer so much?

I ask it quietly at first.

Then angrily.

Then with the exhausted voice of someone who is no longer demanding an answer, only begging to be acknowledged.

Why me?

Why this life?

Why this much pain inside one body?

Why did You keep handing me storms and calling them lessons?

Why did You allow people to break me and then expect me to become someone better because of it?

I am not that strong.

I need You to understand that.

I am not the warrior everyone insists I am. I am not brave every morning. I do not wake up grateful for the battles that made me who I am. Some days, I wake up furious that I had to become this person at all.

I did not need another lesson.

I needed protection.

I did not need pain to make me wiser.

I needed a childhood.

I needed somewhere safe enough to be careless. Somewhere I could be loud without worrying that my existence would become a problem. Somewhere I could make mistakes without feeling as though the entire world might collapse because of them.

I needed someone to notice that I was a child pretending not to be afraid.

But everyone praised me for how well I carried things that should never have been placed on my shoulders.

They called me mature.

What they meant was wounded in a way that made adults comfortable.

They called me calm.

What they meant was too frightened to react.

They called me responsible.

What they meant was already learning how to abandon myself for the sake of everyone else.

God, I am not that strong.

I am tired of being given suffering because I have survived suffering before.

I am tired of being treated as though endurance means consent.

Just because I survived the last thing does not mean it did not kill something inside me.

Just because I stood back up does not mean I was not begging to stay on the ground.

Just because I kept breathing does not mean breathing was easy.

I am the way I am because I watched my life fall apart at a young age.

There was no single moment when everything broke. It happened slowly, then suddenly, then over and over again.

A voice changing.

A door closing.

Someone leaving.

Someone staying but becoming unrecognizable.

A home turning into a place I wanted to escape.

Love becoming something I had to earn.

Safety becoming something that only existed in other people’s houses.

I watched the people who were supposed to teach me love teach me fear instead.

I watched trust turn into suspicion.

I watched promises become temporary things people made when they wanted you to stop crying.

I watched adults hurt one another and then pretend children could not feel the damage shaking through the walls.

But children always know.

Children may not understand words like betrayal, grief, or neglect, but they can always feel when something at home is no longer right.

They know when love has become dangerous.

They know when they have to become smaller to survive it.

So I became small.

I swallowed questions.

I learned not to ask for too much.

I learned to study faces before speaking. I learned to apologize before I knew what I had done wrong. I learned to make myself useful because usefulness felt safer than love. Love could disappear without warning, but usefulness gave people a reason to keep me around.

I became good at needing nothing.

Or at least appearing to.

I carried my life as though it were a glass house already cracking in my hands. Every movement had to be careful. Every emotion had to be controlled. Every breakdown had to happen silently, preferably somewhere nobody would have to deal with it.

And when everything finally fell apart, nobody taught me how to heal.

They only taught me how to continue.

So that is what I did.

I continued.

I went to school. I answered questions. I smiled in photographs. I laughed when laughter was expected. I became the person who could sit in a room full of people while feeling as though I had already disappeared.

I performed normality so convincingly that sometimes even I forgot I was performing.

But survival is not healing.

They are not the same thing.

Survival teaches you how to remain alive inside the burning building.

Healing asks you to walk outside and believe the whole world is not on fire.

I never learned how to do that.

Instead, I decorated the ruins.

I placed flowers over the places that still hurt. I built routines around my fear. I called my distrust intuition. I called my numbness peace. I called my loneliness independence.

I made a home inside the wound because the wound was the only place that had never left me.

And now people meet me years later and wonder why I am like this.

Why I pull away when they come close.

Why tenderness makes me suspicious.

Why I ask whether they are angry when their voice changes.

Why I need reassurance and then struggle to believe it.

Why I sometimes become distant precisely when I care the most.

They see the reaction.

They do not see the history.

They see a locked door and assume I do not want them inside. They do not see the long line of people who entered before them and left the room in ruins.

I do want to be loved.

That is the tragedy of it.

I want it so desperately that I have trained myself to live without it.

I want someone to know me without turning my wounds into reasons to leave. I want someone to hear the ugliest parts of my story and not look at me as though I have become less beautiful for surviving them.

I want to stop feeling ashamed of what was done to me.

I want to stop apologizing for the person I became in order to endure it.

I want to believe that love can be gentle without being temporary.

But every time someone comes close, the child inside me reaches for the alarm.

She remembers.

She remembers what hope cost us.

She remembers every person who said, “You can trust me,” as though trust were a door that opened with words instead of years.

She remembers the people who loved the easy version of me and punished me when the pain became visible.

So I sabotage things before they can destroy me.

I leave conversations emotionally before the other person has the chance to leave physically. I convince myself they are tired of me. I search for proof that the ending has already begun.

Sometimes I find it.

Sometimes I create it.

And when they finally leave, I tell myself I knew they would.

It hurts, but at least the pain is familiar.

Being right about abandonment feels safer than being surprised by love.

Still, there are nights when I lie awake and wonder whether I am the reason everyone goes.

Maybe there is something inside me that cannot be loved for long.

Maybe I am only beautiful from a distance.

Maybe people like the mystery until they realize the mystery is made of grief.

Maybe I ask for too much while pretending I need nothing.

Maybe my silence is too heavy.

Maybe my fear is too exhausting.

Maybe loving me feels like standing outside a burning house, calling for someone who keeps insisting she is not inside.

I wish I knew how to come out.

I wish I knew how to believe the hand reaching through the smoke is not going to disappear the moment I touch it.

I wish I could return to the version of myself who existed before everything fell apart.

But I do not remember her clearly.

Sometimes I wonder whether she ever existed at all.

Perhaps I was born waiting for something to go wrong.

Perhaps sadness found me before I had a name for it.

Perhaps some people inherit houses, jewellery, photographs, and recipes.

I inherited fear.

I inherited silence.

I inherited the instinct to brace for impact during moments of peace.

And still, somehow, I am here.

Not healed.

Not whole.

Not always hopeful.

But here.

There is something almost cruel about that.

After everything, the heart continues beating.

It does not ask whether you are tired. It does not ask whether you believe in tomorrow. It simply keeps pushing blood through the body, insisting on another moment.

Another breath.

Another morning.

Another chance to be left.

Another chance, perhaps, to be loved.

I do not know whether God is testing me, punishing me, shaping me, or simply remaining silent while life happens as life does.

I only know that I am tired of being made into a lesson.

I want to be a person.

Not an example of resilience.

Not proof that broken things can still function.

Not someone people point to when they want to say, “Look how much she survived.”

I want a life that does not require surviving.

I want softness without suspicion.

I want happiness that does not feel like the silence before something terrible.

I want to be held without immediately imagining the emptiness that will remain when the arms are gone.

I want to stop rehearsing grief in the middle of love.

Maybe that is all I have ever wanted.

Not to be saved.

Not to be fixed.

Just to be met.

To have someone sit beside the ruins and not rush to rebuild them. To have someone understand that some parts of me are still buried beneath everything that happened.

To have someone stay long enough for my body to stop preparing for their departure.

To know me is to leave.

That is what life has taught me.

But somewhere beneath the fear, beneath the years of evidence, beneath the child who learned to survive by expecting the worst, a quieter voice still exists.

It asks whether one person might stay.

It wonders whether being known does not always have to end in abandonment.

It whispers that perhaps I am not impossible to love.

Perhaps I am only difficult to reach.

Perhaps my walls are not proof that there is nothing behind them, but proof that what is behind them was once left unprotected.

Perhaps I am not too much.

Perhaps I have simply spent my life asking for love from people who only knew how to offer less.

I do not fully believe these things yet.

But I am trying.

And maybe trying is the closest thing to faith I have left.

Because the truth is, I am not the way I am because I refused to heal.

I am the way I am because my life fell apart when I was still young, and instead of learning how to heal, I learned how to live with the pain.

I learned how to hide what hurt me so no one could see how badly I was struggling.

I learned to build a personality around the pain.

I learned to call surviving a life.

And now I am standing in the middle of everything I endured, trying to understand who I might have been without it.

Trying to separate my soul from the damage.

Trying to believe I am more than the people who left.

Trying to believe God has not forgotten me.

Trying to believe that strength does not have to mean suffering quietly.

Trying to believe that someday, someone will know me—

and stay.