TWENTY TWENTY-2
TWENTY TWENTY-2
This should be a sincere reminder to all that things fall apart.
Not slowly. Not with warning.
They just break.
And nothing,
Nothing,
Breaks like a heart.
2:02am.
I know the exact time because I was staring at my phone like it might ring.
Like someone might call and tell me it was all a mistake.
That she wasn’t really gone.
That I hadn’t really lost everything in the same breath.
That 2022 was just a bad dream and I could wake up now.
Please. Please let me wake up.
But I didn’t.
I watched me die a million times that night.
Not metaphorically, literally.
I watched every version of who I thought I was collapse in real time.
The son. The lover. The believer. The good one.
All of them died at 2:02am, and I was still breathing.
How the fuck was I still breathing?
God, I wanted to cry.
But all my tears had been used up on another loss,
another heartbreak,
another version of me that didn’t make it out.
Despair made me plead like my life was on the line.
Begging God,
the universe,
Anyone listening
“Take it back. Undo it. Give me one more day.”
Just one.
One more conversation. One more hug. One more chance to say the things I didn’t say.
But God doesn’t take returns.
Death doesn’t do exchanges.
And indeed, it did kill parts of me that certain day.
Parts that will never wake up.
Parts I’ve stopped looking for because what’s the point?
They’re gone. She’s gone. I’m gone.
Happy days all stained now.
I can’t look at old photos without seeing ghosts.
Can’t hear certain songs without my chest tightening like someone’s got their fist around my lungs.
I sang them all to another heart.
To Mama, to the me that used to believe things got better.
Now they’re just noise. Beautiful, agonizing noise.
Everything good is contaminated now.
Every memory has her fingerprints on it, and I can’t wash them off.
I’ve tried. God, I’ve tried.
Love gives me terror.
Terror.
Because I know how this story ends now. I’ve seen the last act.
And it’s always the same
someone leaves,
Someone dies.
Someone becomes a memory I can’t escape.
I wanna give someone everything
The songs, the fights, the tears, the hope.
But I gave them all away.
To ghosts. To graves. To a year that took everything and left me hollow.
I chose the year because I had multiple fuck-ups.
Not just one tragedy. A parade of them.
A greatest hits compilation of loss.
I got healed and shattered within days.
Thought I was okay. Thought I could breathe again.
Then something else broke. Then something else. Then something else.
It was like the universe was testing how much one person could take
Before they just stopped being a person entirely.
Spoiler: it’s less than you think.
I was no Achilles
No singular fatal flaw, no dramatic death scene.
Just a man getting back on his heels again and again and again
until he fell into the abyss of silence.
And silence, I got missing.
Because what the fuck was there left to say?
I sat at the crossroads while the heavens drowned me with rain.
Not a drizzle. A downpour.
The kind that soaks through your clothes in seconds, that makes it hard to see,
that turns the world into a blur and your thoughts into static.
Perhaps they knew that I needed that calamity to muffle my yells and screams from others.
Because I was screaming.
Not words
Just sound. Raw, eerie sounds that no human language could carry.
The kind of scream that comes from somewhere deeper than your throat,
somewhere in your chest where all the grief lives that you can’t name.
I wanted to stand up and rage against the dying of the light.
But my hands had been broken one too many times.
Every time I tried to hold on, life pried my fingers loose.
So I stopped reaching. Stopped fighting.
What’s the point of swinging when every punch lands on air?
Merciful, in its way.
The only witness that didn’t judge. The only thing that stayed.
And when it all came downI sat in the middle, waiting for death to come.
At the crossroads I saw my tombstone
I don’t mean I was suicidal.
I mean I saw an early exit, I was ready.
I had stopped fighting. I’d lost too much to care about keeping what was left.
If death wanted me, I wasn’t going to argue.
I was so fucking tired.
Tired of hurting. Tired of pretending I wasn’t. Tired of being the strong one.
Tired of existing in a world that kept taking and taking and never giving back.
But it never did.
My grim reaper sat beside me and held me in her arms instead.
And I realized, death wasn’t the end I was waiting for.
It was the comfort. The only thing that stayed when everything else left.
No pride left to claim I’d survived something.
All I had was a beautiful pain and ashes piled in me.
And I carried them both. What else was I supposed to do?
In the same spot I’d been sitting. Rain stopped. Sun rising.
The world continuing like nothing had happened.
Like I hadn’t just spent the night begging for it to end.
Like my mother wasn’t gone. Like my heart wasn’t shattered.
Like I was still the same person I’d been yesterday.
But I wasn’t.
Not iron chains,
Those you can break. These were strings.
Thin, invisible strings that wrapped around my chest, my throat, my thoughts.
Shame for not saving her. Regret for every word I didn’t say.
For every moment I wasted. For still being here when she wasn’t.
For surviving when I didn’t deserve to.
I fell, in love and in my grave.
Love didn’t save me from the grave. It was the grave.
She looked at me and saw someone whole.
I looked at her and saw an ending I couldn’t stop. Expectations hurt mummy, I've lived it, I define that statement now.
I wanted to sing a song that’d be just ours.
But I sang them all to another heart,
to Mama in her casket
to the versions of me that didn’t make it,
to the hope I buried at that crossroads.
Every touch felt borrowed.
Every good moment felt like a lie I was telling us both.
And if somebody hurts her,
I showed up
If life tried to break her the way it broke me
I was the one who stood between her and the pain.
But I've been broken one too many times.
I’ve got nothing left to swing with.
When you know that loving you means inheriting your ghosts?
When you’re already dead inside and just wearing a person costume?
You try anyway.
And it breaks.
Because of course it does.
Because I break everything I touch now.
Not because I healed. Because I stopped feeling.
The body has a limit, and when you exceed it, it just shuts down.
No joy. No pain. No fear. No hope. Just static.
Just this low hum of nothing that follows me everywhere.
I’m functional. I’m present. I’m breathing.
But I’m not here. Not really.
Not destroyed by them. Built with them.
Used them as foundation, as walls, as the roof over my head.
Regret is all I had left, so I made a home out of it.
Dark. Cold. Familiar.
And maybe that makes me fucked up, but at least it’s honest.
At least I’m not pretending anymore.
Literally,
The thing that made me me
The light,
the warmth,
the belief,
it stayed at that crossroads.
What walks around now is a shell.
Functional. Present. Breathing.
But empty.
Maybe that’s all survival ever was
learning to keep moving
even when the parts of you that knew how to live
are long gone.
Maybe this is just who I am now
a man with no tears left,
no songs unsung,
no love ungiven.
A man with no soul,
carrying 2022 like a scar that never fades,
waiting for what will never come.
husH
Hmmm
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