“I left, but I still check if they liked my posts.”

We dated for 4 years, and yet I don’t remember how it ended — just the silence that followed. They didn’t say goodbye. They just stopped laughing at my texts. Stopped showing up. Now, every photo I post is a message I hope they’ll read without replying. This heartbreak isn’t loud. It just echoes.

Here, stories like this don’t go unread. They land somewhere. Sometimes that’s enough.

“It took a year to smile without faking it.”

I didn’t know how much of me I had buried until I tried to dig myself out. Therapy was weird at first — like handing my pain to a stranger in a clean office — but somewhere between session eight and quitting caffeine, I started noticing sunlight again. Healing wasn’t linear. It was a scribble. But it was mine.

Kindling isn’t just about burning—it’s about rebuilding, slowly, quietly, honestly.

“He said ‘calm down’ — so I wrote a 5,000-word essay.”

Anger used to scare me. Then I realized how much of it was survival in disguise. I screamed into pillows, deleted texts, ran five miles, and still felt like exploding. Writing was the only thing that held the blast. So I wrote it all down — every injustice, every microaggression, every stupid thing he said during meetings. I’m not ‘too much.’ I’m done being small for people who never made room.

Rage can be poetry. You’ll read it here.

“I thought I’d never laugh again. Then came Tuesday.”

I was making eggs when I dropped the carton. Twelve yolks everywhere. For some reason, I just stood there laughing. Not bitter or broken — just laughing, like something cracked open inside me that wasn’t pain. It didn’t fix everything, but for the first time in a long time, I felt like maybe things could get better.

Hope doesn’t arrive all at once. Sometimes it tiptoes in with a messy kitchen floor.