06/04/2026 the thing i can't stop thinking about is her mother's voice. not even the words anymore. just the sound of it. raw in a way that felt animal, like something being torn apart slowly. i can still hear it buried underneath everything else. the alarms, the monitor, the compressions, the hiss of oxygen, the endless stream of commands we bark at each other until language becomes machinery. somehow her mother's voice survives all of it. it follows me home. it slips into the quiet moments. it waits for me in the shwoer and in traffic and at three in the morning when the house is dark enough to feel like a confession booth.
i keep trying to remember when exactly she stopped being a patient and became a wound.
i don't know if it was when she was brought in. or when i saw her family. or when i realized how young she was. young enough that every tube looked obscene. young enough that the room itself seemed disconcerted. everything felt too misplaced around her. the bed, the machines, our voices, our hands. we crowded around her body like people trying to repair a collapsed cathedral with duct tape and desperation.
and yet she lived. which is somehow the worst part. not because i wanted her to die. but because death is a period. this is an ellipsis. she lived, but nobody knows what that means yet.
her heart beats because we bullied it into beating. her lungs move because we refused to leave them alone her body is still here because a room full of strangers declared war against the silence that was trying to take her. and now everyone says the word "alive" like it settles something.
alive. the word feels fraudulent in my mouth.
i keep seeing flashes of things that probably don't even matter. the fluorescent lights reflecting off the floor. somebody's shoe squeaking. the way her arm fell when we moved her. her mother's voice, her sibling's face. the look people get when reality arrives half a second before they do.
and underneath all of it is this ugly thought that keeps growing eeth every time i try to ignore it. you should have done something. not something specific, that's the problem. just something. maybe there was a moment. maybe there was a sentence. maybe there was a question buried somewhere in the wreckage that i never asked. maybe there was a tiny fork in the road hours earlier where a better clinician, a smarter clinician, a more attentive clinician would have turned left instead of right and the outcome would be different.
the rational part of me knows this is bullshit. the rational part of me can cite statistics and timelines and physiology. the rational part of me is losing badly. because guilt isn't interested in evidence. guilt is religious. it demands sacrifice. it kneels beside every memory and whispers, 'what if?
'what if you looked harder? what if you had stayed longer? what if you had noticed earlier? what if? what if? what if?
the phrase drills through my skull until it becomes a pulse of its own. and maybe that's what nobody tells you about emergency medicine. not the blood, not the death, not the trauma. you adapt to those. the human brain is horrifyingly efficient at adapting. eventually you become jaded. the soul calcifies around repeated impact.
until one person slips through. one person finds the crack, and suddenly the armor feels ridiculous. now i'm carrying her around like contraband. i wonder whether she wakes up. i wonder whether she remembers anything. i wonder whether she remembers wanting to die. i wonder whether she remembers us. i wonder whether her family is sitting in a waiting room somewhere replaying every conversation they ever had with her, conducting their own private trial, finding themselves guilty over and over. maybe that's why their voices won't leave me. because we're all standing before the same judge. maybe they're blaming themselves. maybe i'm blaming myself. maybe blame is the only thing that feels alive enough to hold.
sometimes i think about how violent a code actually is. how we disguise it with acronyms and professionalism and clean documentation. we call it resuscitation because that's easier than admitting what it looks like. we break the body open with our hands. we force it back into the world. we drag it toward life kicking and screaming and then afterward we stand around talking about neurological outcomes as if we aren't just performing a small act of sanctioned brutality. and afterward everyone goes home. or tries to. the room gets cleaned, the monitors get reset, the next patient arrives. the machine keeps moving.
but some nights i feel like part of me never left that room. part of me is still standing there beneath those fluorescent lights, listening to a mother cry somewhere behind me, staring at a girl who is technically alive and wondering whether i helped save her life or simply prolonged the radius of an explosion that started long before any of us arrived. and the worst thought is that if she never wakes up, the guilt will become simpler. not smaller, just simpler. instead i have to live with uncertainty. a living thing. a breathing thing. a thing with my fingerprints all over it.
AUTHOR'S NOTE : a bunch of situations merged into one to form this.
holding you ruins the wings
05/02/2026 i keep thinking about jars, about the way glass pretends to be invisible but is really just a wall with better lighting, and how i would hold something soft inside it. like a butterfly, or maybe you, if people could be folded gently enough without breaking their wings. i imagine the quiet certainty of that, the kind of safety that hums instead of trembles, the knowing that you would still be there in the morning, tapping lightly against the edges of me, and i wouldn't have to wonder if the sky had taken you back. i think i want that more than anything, which feels like a confession i'm not supposed to make.
but then i picture the powder on the butterfly's wings coming off on my fingers, how it would dull its colors, how the beating would slow not because it chose to rest but because there was nowhere else to go, and suddenly the jar feels less like safety and more like a paused breath that never gets released. and i wonder what love is supposed to look like if it isn't this. if it isn't holding tightly enough that nothing can slip through, if it isn't building walls so clear you can pretend they're not there. what is security if it doesn't come from keeping, from pressing something close until it forgets there was ever distance?
i get lost in that question, like walking through woods where every tree looks almost the same, where i keep turning in circles thinking i've found a path. because i do want to be soft, i think. i want to be the kind of person who opens their hands and trusts the leaving and the returning, but there's something feral in me that flinches at open space, that thinks vulnerability is just another word for standing in a field during a storm and hoping lightning has poor aim. and i don't know how to reconcile that with the version of love everyone talks about, the one that breathes and moves and chooses, over and over, without being asked to stay.
maybe that's the part that aches, the choosing. because if you chose me, freely, with all the sky still available to you, wouldn't that be more real than anything i could trap? but it also feels thinner somehow, less guaranteed, like trying to sleep without locking the door, like trusting a river not to change its course overnight. i don't know how to sit with that kind of uncertainty without wanting to gather it up, to contain it, to make it smaller and quieter and mine.
so i keep circling back to the jar, to the butterfly, to you, to this idea that if i could just hold something carefully enough it would never leave, and then immediately unraveling at the thought of what holding would cost. because what is love if it needs walls to survive? what is tenderness if it can't exist without fear standing right behind it, whispering instructions?
AUTHOR'S NOTE : i wrote this on my camping trip, watching bugs drift, the forest creak. love and possession have been struggles for me. i asked myself: can love and possession exist together without breaking something?
mine, even when seen
04/14/2026 it starts as pressure. not even a thought, just a density behind the eyes, a storm that refuses to become weather, and i crack it open, just a hairline fracture, just enough to let the statis leak, and suddenly there are foosteps. voices. fingerprints pressed into places that were never built to hold them. they come with their lanterns and measuring tapes, trying to map the inside of something that dissolves when looked at too directly, asking what it means as if meaning isn't the first thing that dies when i drag it out into the open. it isn't a message. it isn't a puzzle. it's a snarl, a broken frequency, a mouth full of gravel that i spit onto the page so i don't choke on it, and they pick through it. a ruin that is still actively collapsing.
i can feel them reaching, always reaching, like hands through thin walls, like teeth testing the edges, wanting a key, a translation, a confession wrapped in something pretty enough to swallow. there is no key. there is no center. there is only this shifting, blistered mass that refuses to sit still long enough to be named without turning into something false, something sanitized, something dead. and still they ask. still they pry. as if i owe them the blueprint to a house that is on fire, as if sharing the smoke means i've invited them to sift through the ashes for something recognizable, something they can hold up and say this is it.
but it wass never for them. it was never meant to survive them. it's a private combustion, a locked room chewing through its own walls, a language that bites back when you try to speak it too clearly. i am not interested in making it digestible. i am not interested in being understood in neat, consumable pieces. i want it jagged, misfiring, wrong. i want it to feel like grabbing a live wire and insisting it's a necklace. i want it to repel, to confuse, to leave a taste that won't rinse out. because the moment it becomes clear, the moment it becomes explainable, it stops being mine. it flattens, it behaves, it lets itself be held, and i don't want it held. i want it feral, i want it pacing, i want it to rot before it ever learns how to sit still under someone else's gaze.
so let it stay fractured. let it stay loud in the wrong ways, silent in the wrong places, stitched together with things that don't belong. let it be something you can't finish chewing. let it be something that looks back at you when you stare too long and refuses to answer. not everything that escapes me is an offering. not everything that is seen is yours to understand. some things are spilled. some things are alive in a way that doesn't include you.
AUTHOR'S NOTE : no notes needed for this one. i'm done posting for a few days nowww
ink drowned . 