the weight that stays

There is still something inside the heart that lingers. Lingers the way it shouldn't, the way unwanted things always seem to know exactly where to stay, settling into the quiet corners like they paid rent, like they belong there more than joy ever did. A heaviness that has learned your name. A clenching deep in the soul, the kind that curls inward like a frightened thing, like a demon who is also somehow a child, something that wants to burn the whole world down and yet in the same breath, in the same savage moment, wants nothing more than to be saved. They call it a symptom, as though naming it makes it smaller, as though a word could be a cage for something that has already swallowed the bars and asked for more.

They say it is a story. And yes, it is. A story sewn together from longing and half-remembered dreams, from a foolishness so sincere it borders on sacred, from a hope so blind it walked straight into walls and called the bleeding beautiful. We have all stood in that particular darkness, every last one of us, felt its particular cold move through us like a season we were too stubborn to stop. Only the shape of it differed. Only the language changed. Mine came out monstrous. Dark and ugly and somehow magnificent in its ruin, shattered the way stained glass is shattered. Still holding colour. Still catching light that nobody was reckless enough to look for.

Fearless but with hands tied by something older than choice, bound by a destiny I did not write and cannot argue with, cannot petition for even a single moment's mercy. And maybe that is the most reckless part of all. Not the burning, not the breaking, but the not knowing. Not knowing if it even exists. If any of it was real or just another story I told myself in the dark because the silence needed a shape and my mind, wild and ungoverned and honestly a little gone, gave it one. Some days it feels like the realest thing that ever happened to me. Other days it dissolves completely and I am left holding nothing, just the outline of something I may have invented out of longing and desperation and that very human, very embarrassing hunger to have something worth ruining yourself for. And the worst part, the truly unhinged part, is that it doesn't even matter. The burning happens either way. The falling goes the same direction, toward the same unnamed warmth, real or imagined, present or phantom, confirmed or completely, gloriously made up. That is not confusion. That is not weakness. That is just the most honest thing I know how to say, that I am reckless enough to ache for something that may only exist in the space between what happened and what I so desperately needed to believe.