Thoughts

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.