For the Girl Who Thought the World Was Gentle

I miss the girl

who used to wait for good things

without fear.

She walked through life

with both hands open,

believing kindness arrived naturally,

like rain in April

or light beneath a doorway.

Back then,

the world still sounded soft.

People’s voices did not hide knives.

Promises meant something durable.

Love was not yet a room

she learned to survive inside.

She used to write her dreams down

in blue notebooks

with curling edges,

certain the future was a place

that welcomed her.

Now those notebooks sleep

inside a dusty box

beneath winter coats and unpaid bills.

Sometimes I open them carefully,

like letters from the dead.

Inside them lives a stranger

with bright unfinished sentences:

I want to change lives.

I want to travel everywhere.

I want to stay soft no matter what happens.

That last line ruins me.

Because life arrived slowly at first.

Not as tragedy,

but as accumulation.

Phone calls that changed everything.

Doors that closed quietly.

People who left without warning.

The long exhaustion

of pretending strength

before it actually existed.

No single moment buried her.

She disappeared gradually,

like shoreline beneath rising water.

First went the innocence.

Then trust.

Then the dangerous habit

of expecting people to stay.

Now I speak carefully,

love carefully,

hope carefully.

Even joy feels borrowed sometimes.

But every now and then,

I catch her returning.

In the way I still pause

to watch sunlight spill across the floor.

In the instinct to help strangers.

In the ache I feel

when someone speaks gently to me.

Maybe she never fully died.

Maybe she simply grew quieter

beneath the noise of surviving.

Still, I mourn her.

The girl who believed

tomorrow would arrive tenderly.

The girl who thought

being good was enough protection.

The girl who stood at the edge of life

without flinching.

I carry her now

like an old photograph folded in my pocket -

creased, fading,

but impossible to throw away.