She carries herself like a crime scene nobody cleaned up right.
Like somewhere inside her veins there’s still caution tape flapping in the dark while everybody around her keeps loving her normal. Touching her normal. Trusting her normal.
And God—
that trust destroys her.
Because she knew better.
Not eventually.
Not afterward.
Not after the doctors and bloodwork and surgeries and words like chronic started attaching themselves to her name like they planned on dying there—
before all of it.
Back when consequences still sounded far away enough to outrun.
There was a voice.
Small. Calm. Almost gentle.
Don’t do this.
And she remembers hearing it clear enough that sometimes she wants to claw her own skin open wondering why hearing it wasn’t enough to stop her.
Now every person she loves feels fragile.
Not weak—
fragile in the way glass is fragile.
Beautiful. Whole. One crack away from becoming something different forever.
And she hates herself for even thinking like that.
Because love ain’t supposed to feel like fear wrapped in skin.
But hers does now.
Now love looks like sitting across from somebody she adores while a second conversation happens underneath the real one:
What if I already ruined something?
What if the damage is quiet right now?
What if my mistakes are still traveling?
That’s the kind of guilt that changes a person’s posture.
Makes them apologize too much.
Makes them pull away when they actually wanna be held closer.
And the surgeries…
the pain…
the body failing in strange rare ways…
that almost feels easier to survive than the shame.
Because pain stays in one body.
But guilt?
Guilt spreads.
It reaches into futures.
Into marriages.
Into children she’s scared to have now.
Into the terrifying possibility that somebody else may one day carry a consequence that started in her bloodstream.
And people say everybody makes mistakes.
Yeah.
But some mistakes become permanent roommates.
Some sit at the edge of the bed every night whispering:
you knew better.
Not louder.
That’s the worst part.
Quiet.
Like a truth that no longer needs to scream.
And if someone she loved ever looked at her with hurt in their eyes because of what she passed on—
she swears she would understand every ounce of anger. Every ounce of grief. She wouldn’t defend herself. Wouldn’t explain. Wouldn’t ask for mercy.
Because accountability feels heavier when love is real.
So now she walks carefully through people’s lives like her existence comes with warning labels nobody can see until it’s too late.
And every time she has to speak the truth out loud, the words don’t feel human leaving her mouth.
They feel like funerals.
Like she’s burying the version of herself that still believed mistakes only belonged to the person making them.
