Open Thoughts

  There are things that happened to me that never leave the room. Even when I’m smiling. Even when I’m loved. They sit quietly in my chest like furniture no one remembers moving in. I lost people I thought would always be there. I lost a child I never got to hold long enough. I lost safety before I understood what it was. I lost a home, a body that felt like mine, and the illusion that love always protects. And still—somehow—I stayed. Not bravely. Not gracefully. I stayed shaking, dissociating, grieving, surviving on instinct and habit. I stayed because leaving would have meant disappearing entirely. People like stories about healing. They like the part where pain becomes purpose. But this isn’t that kind of story. This is about the quiet decision to remain. To keep breathing in a body that remembers everything. To keep loving when abandonment taught me to expect the opposite. I am not whole. I am not fixed. I am not “over it.” But I am here. And that ha...

  Sometimes a town feels different without knowing why. The streets are the same. The buildings haven’t moved. The routines still happen—coffee is poured, doors open, cars pass by—but something is quieter than it used to be. Conversations trail off sooner. Laughter feels hesitant. There’s a shared pause in the air that no one quite names. Someone is gone. Not just someone important to their family or close friends—but someone whose presence reached farther than that. The kind of person whose absence doesn’t stay contained. It spills into everyday life. It settles into familiar places. It leaves a space where something warm and steady used to be. In towns like this, loss doesn’t belong to one household. It belongs to everyone, a little bit. People feel it at the grocery store, in passing conversations, in moments where they expect to see a familiar face and don’t. Even those who didn’t know him well feel the shift. That’s how you know a life mattered—when its absence rearranges the ...