The Hollowing

I have been mourning the ghost of my own life.

For months, I’ve paced through the corridors of my grief, whispering elegies to the version of myself that died for your affection.

I offered you everything — bone, breath, and spirit — yet it was not enough to tether you to me.

Your departure was not sudden; it was the slow death of a thousand small abandonments.

Even as I bled devotion, you slipped further into the dark.

I knew you would not change your stripes, yet I knelt before that illusion.

I do not regret it. I would burn myself again upon the altar of your indifference if it meant I might feel the faint warmth of your regard.

I suffocated quietly in your silence, mistaking it for love.

When you left, I thought the wound was fresh, but it had been festering for years.

I adored you, and in doing so, I came to despise the creature that adored.

To keep you, I would have clawed at my own skin until you found me pleasing.

I hollowed myself to mirror your desire, carving out the inconvenient parts of my soul.

I buried the girl I once was — deep, deliberate, mercilessly.

Every smile was a gravestone; every compromise, another shovel of dirt.

I disguised the rot within, locking my depression in the attic, my anxiety bound and gagged beneath the floorboards.

I wanted you to love the corpse I’d become.

You taught me that affection must be earned through self-destruction.

And so I learned to disappear gracefully.

You called it a “lesson” when you looked through me.

You starved me of notice until I was skeletal with longing.

I waited for a savior who never came — imagined heroes bursting through doors, imagined fathers who were never mine.

But they never arrived, and I grew accustomed to the silence.

When you once took my hand at a dance, I felt my first panic seize my ribs like iron bands.

Even then, I knew I did not belong in that gilded house of strangers.

Your wife’s eyes were daggers, and your love — a myth whispered to soothe me.

At night, I cried to the ceiling, to the dark, to my mother who could not hear me.

You hid the phone, but I still prayed into the dial tone.

In time, I learned that being forgotten is safer than being found.

I built my sanctuary from absence.

Now, I chase away those who come too close — a preemptive mourning.

If all will leave, let it be on my terms.

There is peace in choosing your own abandonment.

You will never see me happy — but there may be happiness beyond your shadow.

I did not live for you, though I believed I did.

I lived for the silence that followed your rejection — the familiar ache of unworthiness.

I molded myself into every version you desired: the quiet one, the clever one, the small one.

I became less, and less, until I was nothing but an echo in your ear.

You never intended to stay.

You fed on my time, my worship, my ruin — and called it love.

You saw me as fleeting; I saw you as forever.

But forever was the cruelest invention of all.

Love, I’ve learned, is not extinguished — it is smothered beneath neglect.

It gasps until it grows still.

And so I buried my love beside the girl I once was.

Now, I write from her grave.

The air is thin here — I can feel the walls closing in.

Sometimes I imagine I’ve escaped, that I’m walking under stars, that I’ve rebuilt myself anew.

But then I blink, and I’m still here —

in the same dark room,

among the same bones,

listening to the same silence that wears your voice.

And perhaps the cruelest truth of all —

is that I no longer know

if it was you

or I

who buried me alive.