They don’t knock anymore.
They moved in quietly, like they paid rent in relief.
Now they sit in my pocket like a second heartbeat
and line up in my bathroom mirror like patient strangers
waiting for me to believe them again.
They call themselves help.
But they feel more like a voice with hands that know exactly where I break.
“Just one,” they say,
leaning in like they belong to my survival,
smiling soft enough to feel like safety
but sharp enough to cut my resistance down to size.
I want to believe them.
Because pain is not gentle.
Pain is loud in my bones,
a storm that forgets how to end,
a constant argument inside my skin.
So I reach for them.
Not like victory.
Like surrender.
And for a moment, they win.
The world goes quiet in a way that is not peace,
just absence wearing a mask.
That is what scares me now.
Not that they silence the pain,
but that they teach me to crave the silence more than my own healing.
They start to feel like a habit with a halo.
They sit beside my sadness like they belong there
and instead of holding me through it
they offer me erasure.
And I am learning that forgetting is not freedom.
It is disappearance dressed up as comfort.
The more I listen, the more I notice it.
How they don’t fix what is broken,
they just mute the alarm and call it mercy.
But the alarm always comes back louder.
So I sit here now with the noise unmuted.
With the shaking.
With the raw edges of being alive without being numbed.
And I realize something I don’t want to admit.
Anything that promises to take everything away
will eventually try to take me with it.
So I try something different.
I let the silence be mine without them.
I let the pain exist without obeying it.
I stay.
Not whole. Not healed.
But here.
And that has to count for something.
Still breathing,
Me