Going Back

I guess maybe I've changed.

Or maybe the world changed without me.

Maybe all those roads I spent years missing were never roads at all, just circles worn into the dirt from walking the same grief under different skies.

Maine. Wisconsin. Florida.

The scenery changes.

The lesson doesn't.

My life has become a series of toilets and sandboxes, cleaning up messes that were never mine, digging myself out just to find another wall.

And I am tired.

Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes.

The kind that settles into your bones after years of proving.

Years of being honest.

Years of being vulnerable.

Years of holding out your throat and calling it courage.

I thought if people could see me clearly, really see me, they would understand my worth.

Instead, all I seemed to prove was how much I could survive.

Abandonment.

Disappointment.

Being used.

Being remembered only when convenient.

Being loved only in fractions.

I've spent a long time walking with ghosts.

A really, really long fucking time.

Chasing echoes.

Mistaking absence for mystery.

Building homes inside people who had already moved out.

Maybe it's time I become a ghost too.

Not that kind.

God knows I'll survive.

If nothing else, I've always been too stubborn to quit.

Too mean to let the universe win.

You motherfuckers aren't getting rid of me that easily.

No.

I mean the kind of ghost that stops knocking.

Stops asking.

Stops waiting to be chosen.

The kind that slips quietly out of rooms where they were never invited and never comes back.

Because all I wanted was to feel something.

And all I got was confirmation.

The same answer life has handed me in every zip code I've ever called home.

What hurts you here will hurt you there.

What follows you was never the place.

It was the wound.

So now I sit here in the glow of a computer screen,

older,

sadder,

and maybe a little wiser,

wondering what it would look like to finally stop measuring myself through someone else's eyes.

Wondering what enough feels like when nobody else is deciding.

Because I know one thing now.

I will never convince another person of my value.

And maybe that's not my job.

Maybe my job is to return to the stories.

To the monsters.

To Stitch.

To all the worlds waiting patiently while I wandered through this one, begging ghosts to hold my hand.

There is nothing there for me anymore.

Only echoes.

Only lessons.

Only empty houses.

I'm never going back.

Not because I was defeated.

Because I finally know when a story is over.