I’ve thought about it
ending my life.
I do not hold the means,
but the thought slips in anyway,
quiet as dust in the air.
It never shows me how.
It shows me them.
My parents standing in a room
that suddenly feels too large,
too quiet,
their names spoken in past tense.
A voice at the door.
A sentence they cannot unhear.
The ground shifting beneath them
without moving at all.
Strangers with softened eyes,
gentle voices,
hands that do not know where to rest.
I see it before anything else,
the aftermath
spreading like a stain
that does not wash out.
I have known pain.
I will not hand it back to them
with my name attached.
Because there is something crueler
than suffering alone,
and it is a parent
left standing
after their child is gone.
So ask me,
and I will tell you no.
Not because the thought is silent,
not because it leaves me,
but because it stays
and I stay with it.
It has followed me since childhood,
a shadow that learned my shape.
There were days
I tried to carve it out of myself,
before I understood
that skin remembers,
that it keeps score
in lines I cannot explain away.
Even now
it lingers,
a voice without a body,
a door I will not open.
I know the edges of myself.
I know where I stop.
And this
this is one of those places.