I wanted to care about kissing boys and playlists.
Instead, I watched the world unravel, thread by thread,
like I was the one pulling it
and didn’t know how to let go.
I used to love puzzles.
Until I became the piece that didn’t fit.
Caught between fractured nations on a flickering screen
and the dying dialect of kindness.
I felt like its only speaker.
I didn’t spread kindness to save the world.
I spread it to remind myself I was still in it.
To prove I wasn’t just a spectator
to the slow-motion burn of everything,
broadcast in high definition.
War was on the news again.
Every headline a punch.
Every image a bruise.
It felt like trying to drink from a firehose aimed at my chest.
Relief came only in the knowledge
that it was killing me slowly.
I was sixteen, heavy with knowing.
I see her now in a photograph buried beneath rubble.
Still there. Still looking up.
Still hoping someone might come back for her.
That was when I began to calcify.
Sealing off pieces of myself like endangered artefacts.
Self-preservation disguised as maturity.
I couldn’t let one more feeling in.
Not while I carried the world too.
The weight of it trembling in my hands.
My knees close to breaking.
War didn’t knock.
It seeped in like mould. Quiet. Permanent.
We didn’t know it had moved in
until it was in our beds and breath,
in the silence between tick and tock.
It claimed my father’s chair.
It curled up beside me at night
and whispered: you’re next.
Mum stared into her coffee
like it might speak sense if she listened hard enough.
It never did.
She never came back.
BEFORE THE RUPTURE
I don’t know much yet.
Only that Mum’s laugh shines brightest
when she forgets she’s tired.
That the garden smells like green lightning after rain.
That glitter and electrical tape can fix almost anything,
if you believe hard enough.
My little brother believes that.
When I grow up, I want to be
an actress, a vet, a singer with purple hair.
A mum with twins
and a dog called Lightning.
I tell people I dream about who I’ll become.
I mean it literally.
Each night, behind my eyelids,
a private cinema flickers to life.
I try to steer the reel somewhere else.
There’s nothing.
She comes.
Future me.
She moves like someone carrying invisible weight.
She walks like she’s bracing for earthquakes
she can’t see but still feels coming.
She smiles, but only at the corners.
She knows things no child should know.
She will never tell me.
I think something called war has moved in and stayed.
Not the one on the news.
The one inside her.
She feels too much.
She hides it well.
She keeps everyone else stitched together
while quietly coming undone.
That’s not what I meant
when I said I wanted to help.
When I wake, I remember every frame.
I feel the room before people speak.
I distract Mum from her coffee before she tastes it.
I sense the sadness before she does.
My chest tightens when the news hums from the next room,
even with the sound off.
They call it imagination.
I think it’s something else.
It feels like a siren.
Sometimes I look in the mirror
and see someone already tired.
Like something is waiting for me
and it won’t be kind about what it takes.
Before sleep claims me,
I whisper a spell my body seems to understand.
Don’t stop feeling.
Don’t harden your heart.
And when love comes marching,
let it in.
Even if it limps.
Even if it’s late.
Especially when it’s hard.
If I could speak to her, the girl I’ll become,
I’d hold her face in my small hands and say:
Please don’t stop feeling.
I know it hurts.
But no one can save the world
if they don’t feel it.
And you need to try.
I don’t know why I know that.
I just do.
AFTERMATH
I survived.
But I didn’t come through untouched.
It lives in my posture.
In the way I flinch at sirens.
In how I scan every room for exits,
even when I’m safe.
I grew up knowing too much, too early.
A teenager translating chaos into calm
for everyone else.
I became fluent in silence.
In pretending.
In swallowing the scream.
I learned how to soothe others
while abandoning myself.
They called it empathy.
I called it erosion.
Even now, I pause before joy.
Wait for the punchline before I laugh.
Check the world’s pulse before my own.
I got good at surviving.
So good, I forgot how to live.
But that girl,
with trembling hands and a seismic heart,
she saved me.
Not with armour.
With openness.
She felt everything
when it was easier not to.
She chose kindness
when fear was louder.
She kept marching
when love looked weak
and silence looked safe.
I didn’t need to become harder.
I needed to become her again.
The one who believes love is a force.
Not a soft one.
A radical, bone-deep, table-flipping kind.
Because now I know:
no one can save the world
if they don’t feel it.
And the ones who feel it hardest
are not broken.
They’re the blueprint.