What Fifteen Left Behind - by Tomithewordpecker

It lastedThen lingered.Now it has furniture in my head. Funny, what a moment can own of you. We were four,and I thought that meant something. Fifteen, and finally found deep conversations after lights out,Birthdays remembered,Laughter that felt like it had always known my name."This is it", I thought.The friendship that I had been looking for like a traveller who finally found a home. She felt like more than a friend.I loved being around her.The way you love the first warm day after a long harmattan.She became my joy.That was my mistake. I had forgotten she was human. Something shifted the way weather shifts.No single moment,Just a morning when the warmth had quietly packed its things and left. I was not okay that term.Family things. Heavy things.The kind that sit on your chestAnd make ordinary breathing feel like an achievement. I needed them to ask three words. Three words that could bandage my broken spiritAnd pick up the pieces of my shattered heart. Just "are you alright?"Three words.The distance between drowning and shore. Nobody asked. They looked at my silence and called it attitude.Looked at my unraveling and called it weird. So I followed her around like an apologyThat hadn't found its sentence yet.I did humiliating things,The kind that hollow you out slowly just to be let back in. She laughed.They all laughed. When I finally trusted one with the truth,She carried it straight to the others,Gift-wrapped in misinterpretation. So I begged.Fifteen years old,Down on the knees of my dignity, "sorry sorry sorry"Falling from my mouthLike I had been practicing since birth. I begged so much the drops of sweat felt like hail on my skin.On my knees and only thinking how these people were my lifeline."I should hold on to them or I'll surely not survive.I'd die" These friends who once calmed my heart,Turned it into a stormInto a desperate, old soul.I could no longer imagine myself whole.But maybe they'll forgive if I grab their soles."hold on! hold on! hold on!" But...NO "you're begging like we're monsters", they said.(I did not say what I was thinking) There is a sound I have not forgotten. I walked in one evening just to take something,The way you walk into a place that used to be yours, And she hissed. Loud enough for me to hear.Casual enough to know she didn't think twice. That sound entered meAnd has never fully left. The room became a prison without a single lock.The place meant for rest became the place that broke me.I stopped sleeping. Stopped wanting four walls.Started asking, quietly, to disappear. Three girls stayed.Not the ones I had chosen, The ones who chose me.Younger. Wiser than anyone knew.They sat with me in the 2am,Spoke into silences nobody else would enter.They didn't fix me, They just refused to leave. I survived that term.Not healed. Not whole. SURVIVED I am older now.The room is not that room.She is not my joy anymore.I know now to keep that somewhere safer. But sometimes someone exhales near meWith a little too much edge,And my whole body remembers what it decided that year: "PEOPLE LEAVE.PEOPLE TURN.PEOPLE LAUGH AT THE SOFTNESS THEY ASK YOU TO SHOW THEM". I am still unlearning this. That is what fifteen can do to a personIf the wrong hands hold it.It does not leave.It only learns to live inside you...more quietly.

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