im_shahhhh :
There’s a child I still carry
There is a small child inside me who never learned what safety felt like only how to stay quiet, how to take up less space, how to pretend it didn’t hurt when someone walked away. All he ever wanted was to be held the way fragile things are held not like a burden, not like something left out but like something someone chose to keep. He didn’t ask for much. Just a calm voice. A steady hand. A place where his fears didn’t echo so loudly. But the world moved fast, and people came and went like passing weather. He learned to stay still,
to stay small, to pretend he didn’t notice
when warmth began to fade.
Now I feel him sometimes soft, shaking, holding memories of every person who didn’t stay. He keeps them like folded notes, like pressed flowers delicate, fading, hidden deep inside my chest.
I wonder who he would’ve been
if someone had stayed longer.
If someone had held him gently
and whispered, “I’m not going anywhere.”
If someone had taught him that breaking wasn’t shameful, that needing softness
didn’t make him hard to love. Life taught him instead that people leave,
that warmth expires, that even promises grow tired. So he learned to hold himself,
to patch his own wounds,
to survive quietly. Yet even now,
after all the leaving, that child still lifts his head and hopes ., hopes someone will come with gentle hands
and the patience to stay. But until this year ends, until time softens or decides,
I choose to protect what’s left of him what’s left of my heart. Unbothered.
Guarded. Quietly alive.
I will keep him safe inside me,
so he doesn’t disappear completely. So he doesn’t learn to feel nothing. And when the day finally comes when someone truly finds me, or I find them i hope they don’t find me empty. Not already dead inside.
But alive enough to give that little boy the gentleness he waited for.
Alive enough to finally stop pretending.
Alive enough to be held.
But i wish not dead, not dead…❤️🩹
2025-12-14 09:48:46