I noticed it first because it didn’t belong. A paper sat in the far corner of my bedroom, half-forgotten like it had been waiting there longer than I’d been paying attention. I couldn’t have told you why it pulled at me. There wasn’t any clear reason. It was just… an itch in my chest, the kind that doesn’t go away until you acknowledge it.
Then I saw the pen.
It was under the bed, pushed back in the dust and shadows. I stared at it for a second, and something in me shifted—like the part of my mind that usually stays quiet had finally decided it was done obeying. My body moved before I could think about it. I crawled under the bed and reached out with the same urgency you use when you don’t believe you’ll get another chance.
The pen was real. Clear blue. BIC. No cap.
I don’t know what expression I had on my face, but I remember feeling oddly sure of myself, as if I’d found a door where there should only have been a wall. My eyes blurred—not from sadness exactly, but from how fast everything in me was moving. I knew what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to keep everything trapped inside my ribs until it started eating through me. I was going to write. I was going to write letters—to whoever my saviour or helper would be, in this life, in whatever form that means. I promised myself right there, in that bright strip of light I pulled it into, that I wouldn’t stop until I found a way out of this house.
I jumped to the study desk and grabbed the paper from the corner like I was afraid the moment would disappear. The room looked harsher under the lights. My hands shook once, then steadied. I tore more pages free from books piled nearby, because one sheet wasn’t enough. I wrote until the adrenaline in my body slowed down, until my thoughts stopped sprinting and started lining up on the page.
For the first time in days—maybe weeks—it felt like I could breathe.
Not because everything was suddenly better. It wasn’t. But I had somewhere to put what was happening in my head. I needed a person who could hold the weight of my words without demanding I perform happiness for them. There was nobody like that. Not in the way I needed. The people around me cared, technically. They could listen and nod and offer comfort. But they didn’t truly leave their lives behind to step into mine. They didn’t rearrange their routines to make space for what I was carrying. They didn’t understand what it means to keep swallowing pain until it becomes ordinary. So I wrote.
Dear saviour or helper,
I don’t know what to do or say anymore. Things feel too hard to keep pretending they don’t weigh on me, and I’m scared of ending up numb—not calm, not healed. Just empty. Because I feel everything. It’s too strong to ignore, but I don’t know what to do with it. I’ve been cruel to my mom while she’s still recovering, and I hate that I can’t take it back. I probably pushed Adam away too—if he left because I wasn’t good enough to stay. I keep replaying it, searching for the exact moment when everything split apart. I tell myself maybe it’s my fault. And when I try to prove that it isn’t, I only end up with more questions. I feel like I’ve become the thing I fear.
Not one specific moment. Not one specific argument. Something deeper. A person with the same patterns as the betrayal that formed me. For not only being the first to abandon us, but for leaving us behind in a way that didn’t just hurt—it broke the balance in our home and left the pieces uneven. Dad. I can still feel it. The scar isn’t only on skin; it’s the memory of that day carved into the way my body reacts when something goes quiet. It’s the way certain words make my stomach tighten. That scar never heals properly. It just learns how to hide. And now Mom and Adam—different circumstances, different people—keep tearing at it, as if they don’t realize how close it is to the surface. I don’t even know what I’m writing. Why I’m writing. What I want from this page besides release. I just want freedom. I want to be delusional, if delusion means having something bright to reach for. I want a dream I can actually aim at. Something simple enough to fit inside a sentence, but impossible to explain without the conversation turning endless and tangled. People wouldn’t understand why I insist it’s simple. They don’t have to live inside the same storm I do.
I’ve thought it through. I didn’t come to my conclusions out of nowhere. I used what I know from experience, from observation, from the way patterns repeat whether I want them to or not. It doesn’t take a genius to understand the shape of a problem when you’ve been inside it for a long time. All I wanted—what I keep wanting—is to say, out loud and with pride:
“My trauma is not my identity.”
I want to be able to talk about other things in my life. Achievements. Goals that have nothing to do with family drama. Good news that doesn’t come with the shadow of an argument attached. I want to learn how to exist without always returning to the same wound. My…
I couldn’t finish the thought. My eyes started burning, and then my face did what it always does when I finally stop resisting—grimacing, tearing up, the kind of crying that makes you feel both embarrassed and powerless at the same time. The paper soaked through. My nose ran without permission. My body couldn’t decide whether it was trying to protect itself or collapse.
I was angry and sad. Angry at them—for everything. Angry at whoever decided I should be born into a life where I had to learn survival before I learned peace. Angry at my creator. Angry at Him. It sounds harsh, but it was the truth of how I felt at that moment.
The “why me” questions came like they were owed a response. Why didn’t He make me resilient? Why didn’t He make me strong? Why didn’t He put me in a stable family where gratitude came naturally instead of like a performance I had to force? But the more I asked, the more I found the same answer sitting behind my anger: none of it would change what’s in front of me. Still, I kept searching.
Now, I look back and find it almost funny, in the way you find old bruises funny only because they’re not fresh anymore.
Ring.
The bell woke me up again.
Fourth time today, during a lesson. I could tell the teachers had stopped expecting anything from me. Maybe they were exhausted by my presence. Maybe they’d decided I was beyond help. I could picture them in the staff room—soft voices, sympathy disguised as gossip. It didn’t matter. I still felt it: those looks that said they pitied me, that they’d already written my future in pencil. I can’t pass a single pair of them without catching that expression. Then the hallway chatter begins when they think I can’t hear. Not everyone says things directly. Some people don’t need to. Their silence is loud enough. And my classmates? Everyone apart from Delilah acts like I’m disgusting. The weirdo who sleeps in class. The girl who doesn’t eat. The one with the black notebook—the notebook that’s always out, always scribbling, always recording something they think they understand. They don’t understand. They never will. They look at it like a symptom instead of a lifeline.
I’m sick of it. Tired. Exhausted. I can’t deal with having to take care of my mom at home while I’m trying to survive at school. I can’t carry my sanity, my image, my grades, and still pretend I’m fine when the day begins. It’s too much.
Wait—my grades.
That’s the part that matters. It’s the only escape I’ve been able to count on. If I lose focus, if my grades keep dropping, then I lose the route I’ve been building in my head: school success leading to freedom, leading to leaving. The worst part is that everything at home feels like it can collapse instantly, but my grades—my grades are the one thing that should move in a straight line. Except they’re not. They plummeted when everything started going wrong. And now I’m staring at them like they might be the last thing holding me in place. NO. It can’t be over because my grades couldn’t keep up with my life. It can’t be that simple. And yet… I feel broken enough to believe it anyway. As if I can’t accomplish anything. As if everything is ruined. I looked at Delilah. She was sitting like she belonged there. Like her body had never learned the habit of shrinking. I admired her without trying to become her. She made me angry sometimes—not at her, but at how easily people like her seem to exist. Like the world gives them space automatically.
I had let myself go. Physically. Emotionally. I stopped caring about beauty standards and social expectations because after everything happened, they felt like pointless rules written for a different life. But not caring doesn’t protect you. It just changes the way people judge you. They assume if you stop performing, you must be failing. I don’t want to create an image that says “I’m okay” when I’m not. That’s not who I am now, and I don’t have the energy to keep pretending. If my face doesn’t look friendly, if I don’t smile enough, if my eyes look tired, then fine. Let them decide whatever they want.
I’m trying to cope at home. I’m trying to hold myself together long enough to survive tomorrow. The only thing linking my life to school is the success I might earn by the end of it. That success is supposed to be an escape route. But when I look at my grades, I don’t know if that route is still available.
And there’s no stable shortcut in life. Not really.
Dear saviour or helper,
Today was a weird day—not loud, not dramatic, just quietly wrong. I kept thinking about things I’d forgotten: forgotten people, forgotten feelings, forgotten versions of myself that existed before everything became routine pain. I don’t know how to recover properly. I don’t know what the right steps are. I only know I want to get there. I want to reach that place where my mind doesn’t feel like a room full of locked doors. Is it wrong to want something without having to work for it? People don’t even have proper goals anymore—not like they used to. These days it’s a comparison instead of ambition. It’s envy dressed up as motivation. Watching other people succeed and thinking my only option is to chase them, not myself. But when you climb to the top by using other people as a measuring stick, you can start to feel empty—like you didn’t actually build anything that belongs to you. Like you climbed just to escape embarrassment, not to reach meaning. Then guilt shows up. It’s always there, remembering who you stepped on—whether you meant to or not. Today, for the first time in a long time, I felt something different. I wanted something for personal benefit, not to outpace or shame anyone else. I wanted it because I deserved a life that made sense to me. Something I could reach without turning it into a competition. And then I realized something else: I let myself go because I stopped believing I could be happy in any real way. I used to go out with friends more often. I posted online all the time. I wasn’t always joyful—I wasn’t magically protected from suffering. But at least I pretended. And pretending was still better than this. This feels like a loop that never ends. A cycle I keep walking through until I don’t recognize my own pace. I don’t know if I’ll ever get my escape. But I’m writing this down, so maybe that means I haven’t given up. And now I…
“Chloe!!! Get over here!”
Mom interrupted my train of thought. I took a deep exhale, as if I wasn’t able to breathe whenever I wrote these letters. I went to her—whatever she needed to say—because I wanted it over and done with so I could go back. Go back and relieve my thoughts through writing again.
But the feeling was too voracious. It had become an addiction of sorts.
For some reason, I felt the need to smile. I’d gone mad, yes—but at least I could express it. That twisted thought somehow gave me joy.
“I need you to get your arse out of that bedroom and clean up this house. You need to do your chores like a normal daughter would.”
“Well, I’m not good enough for you, am I, mother?” I thought. “I’m not normal? I wonder why.”
“And also, you have a package,” she added. “It’s on the kitchen counter.”
The moment she said that, I ran to the kitchen to see what it was—who it was from. ‘Adam?’ I hoped. There was a note attached to it.
~ Happy Birthday Chloe. Love Simon.
I’d even forgotten the day before was my birthday.
As disappointed as I was—in myself, and in the sender—I still took the package and carried it back to my bedroom, ignoring my mother’s glare. I sat on my bed, a mix of excitement and happiness flooding through me. It felt like I was holding a light—something that would help me survive. That’s how much small joys mean to me. They glue together the fragments of my sanity, trying to make me feel whole.
I opened the box.
A laptop. A MacBook Pro. M3!
Wow.
It was one of the best gifts ever. I actually wanted a laptop. How did he know?
At the bottom of the box, there was a letter. A letter from him. My hand reached for it—
And then I heard loud footsteps charging toward my bedroom door.
“Chloe! What is wrong with you! Why can’t you listen to me? Simple instructions!”
My heart felt like it stopped. My brain went into a pin-drop silence, and yet panic erupted all at once—chaos. I was too scared. Her shouting was a trigger. A trigger for shock I couldn’t explain. It felt like I was reliving something that had already happened to me.
I fell to my knees.
My mother kept shouting.
I crouched and covered my ears with my hands, gripping them so hard out of fear. This wasn’t ordinary fear. It felt like I was about to die. My lungs felt tired, but my heart was racing. I tried to breathe and couldn’t. I saw blood on the floor—my nose was bleeding.
I looked up at my mother, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Then, before everything turned black, my last thoughts were:
“Does she not care about me? No. That’s not the question. Why am I so scared of her right now? How is this different?”
…To be continued