What I Didn’t Say

I have been hiding for a long time. I wore long sleeves and said I loved how it felt - in the blistering heat. I avoided the mirror and sat outside letting the breeze wash over me - praying it would blow me away one day. I walked down the same street every morning, smiling at people who had no idea what that smile was costing me.

I called it bravery. I said it under my breath like a vow: keep going, don’t let them see. And for a while I believed myself. I thought it was bravery as an armor. No, a disguise. Armor protects the person wearing it. A disguise only protects everyone else from having to know.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, my body started keeping its own records. A name most doctors have to look up, and I learned to sit in exam rooms, hospitals, and ERs explaining a life omitted from most textbooks. They never met me, only my condition. I learned to shrink it down to a sentence so nobody else got uncomfortable. I learned ‘how are you’ isn’t really a question. Every plan I made started coming with a quiet asterisk, and I carried that, too, under the same disguise.

I felt the love change, too. Not all at once. Love rarely ends with a slammed door. It thins. It's the good-morning text that comes a little later each week, the hand that used to reach for mine and started reaching for a phone. I kept setting a place at the table for someone who had already half left, and I kept telling myself that if I hurt quietly enough, I wouldn't be a burden. So I turned the ache inward, because it felt like the only place it was allowed to go.

Here is what I know now. The hurt you hide doesn't stay small because you hide it. It grows in the dark. And the pain I carved into myself never answered the pain I actually felt. It didn't bring her back, and it didn't make me smaller or easier to leave. It only taught me to be my own enemy.

They say that the day after you take your life, your mother will weep and your father will go quiet in a way that never fully breaks. They say everyone dies, and the ones left behind move on, no matter how hard, because life is going to life. And I believe that. The world keeps turning; the mail still comes; someone still has to mow the grass.

But I've also thought about what ‘moving on’ actually looks like. It's my mother setting down a second coffee cup out of habit for years. It's my father driving past the places I used to go and taking the long way home for the rest of his life. People do keep living. That isn't the same as being okay without me. Life goes on, but it goes on with a hole in it shaped exactly like me, and nothing ever fills it.

Some mornings I get up, and some mornings I just don't stay down, and I'm not sure anymore that those are the same thing.

People tell me I'm brave. It's easier than the truth, which is that I'm tired, I'm still wearing the disguise, and I wrote this instead of saying it to anyone's face.