Unloved

She carries more than her years allow,

the eldest born, the unchosen keeper.

While others were free to need,

she was told to endure,

to stitch silence into strength.

Abandonment is not a single memory—

it is the echo of family walls

that never sheltered her completely.

It is the way love felt rationed,

how presence always came

with a shadow of absence.

She learned to mother herself,

to swallow her ache before it could spill,

to hold the pieces of a home

that leaned on her small shoulders.

Beneath her calm, a fracture speaks:

"I was left too soon,

asked to be whole before I was ready."

And still—

she walks forward,

haunted yet unbroken,

a testament that even the forgotten eldest

can shape her own meaning of love.