Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
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I was taught that strength is measured by what you can control. I believed it for a long time. Control felt clean and precise and necessary. Only later did I learn how easily it turns into harm when it is wrapped in the language of care. I stand before her with that knowledge lodged deep in my chest. I do not know what to do with it.
I want to protect her. The thought arrives uninvited and settles heavily. Protection sounds noble until I see how it narrows her world. Every boundary I draw feels like another wall rising between her and the air she needs to breathe. If I step closer I risk becoming the thing she must endure. If I step away I leave her alone with shadows I helped create. There is no choice that feels clean.
Love is worse. Love demands honesty and presence and a courage I am not certain I possess. I have seen what love does when it clings too tightly. I have seen how it reshapes another person until they no longer recognize themselves. I cannot allow my feelings to become a gravity that pulls her inward until she disappears. So, I bury them where they ache quietly and call it restraint.
I watch without asking to be seen. I tell myself this distance is mercy. I tell myself silence can be gentle. Each day I repeat these lies until they almost sound like truth.
Yet when night comes and the world grows still my resolve weakens. I wonder whether my silence feels like abandonment to her. I wonder whether my careful distance teaches her that she must keep retreating to survive. The thought follows me into the dark and refuses to loosen its grip.
I do not know how to shield someone without hurting them. I do not know how to love without demanding something in return. All I know is that every step toward her feels dangerous and every step away feels unforgivable. I remain suspended between these choices. I endure it because I must. I endure it because losing myself is easier than risking the loss of her.
I try to remember the moment when everything tilted. There is no clear sound of breaking. No single wound I can point to and name. The world did not announce its cruelty. It simply stopped holding me the way it once did.
Sadness lives in me now. It is not loud. It does not scream. It settles quietly behind my ribs and stays. I wake up with it. I carry it through the day. At night it grows heavier as if darkness feeds it. I do not fight anymore. I am too tired to pretend it will leave.
I ask myself what I did wrong. I search my past like a room stripped bare. I find no violence in my hands. No malice in my words. I remember believing in people. I remember trusting warmth when it was offered. I remember thinking the world rewarded gentleness. If these are crimes then I was guilty long before I understood the law.
Pain keeps arriving without explanation. It arrives as a touch. As silence. As waiting. It arrives as the knowledge that my suffering requires no permission. The world does not need a reason. It only needs a body willing to remain.
Sometimes I feel myself being observed. Not claimed. Not comforted. Simply seen from a distance that cannot reach me. That distance hurts more than cruelty ever did. It tells me that even concern can remain untouched. Even care can choose not to close the space between us.
I grieve constantly. I grieve for the girl who laughed without caution. I grieve the ease with which she trusts me tomorrow. She feels like someone I once met and lost. Her voice echoes faintly inside me. I answer her less each day.
I am still breathing. That fact surprises me. I move through hours that feel undeserved. I endure things I never agreed to carry. The world keeps shaping me smaller. Quieter. More careful. As if my presence itself is something that must be reduced.
I do not understand why this was given to me. I do not understand what balance is being restored through my pain. I only know that I am here. Still standing. Still breaking in ways that leave no visible mark. Still waiting for an explanation that never comes.
I carry a fury that has nowhere to go. It coils inward and burns through me because there is no enemy left to strike except myself. I know what my hands have done. I know the line I crossed while convincing myself that control was the same as necessity. The knowledge does not fade. It sharpens with time and turns every breath into an accusation.
I despise the part of me that believed power could replace consent. I despise the silence I wrapped around her afterward as if quiet could undo violence. I look at her and see the fracture I caused and I understand that no punishment would be equal to it. What I stole cannot be returned by remorse or vigilance or restraint. The truth sits inside me and refuses absolution.
I am furious at a world that took a gentle girl and ground her down until endurance became her only language. I am furious at the cruelty that taught her to accept pain without protest. Nothing enrages me more than how ordinary suffering has become in her eyes. The world did this long before I did. That knowledge does not save me. It only adds another layer to my hatred.
Yet, there is a rage I barely allow myself to name. It rises when I remember how she did not fight. How she yielded as if resistance had already been beaten out of her by hands far crueler than mine. The anger terrifies me because it is tangled with grief and fear. I wanted her to scream and to strike and to remind me that she was still fighting for herself. She did none of those things and the absence shattered me.
I am trapped inside these truths. I am the one who broke what was already breaking. I am the one who rages at the ruin while standing at its center.
There is a pain that settles deeper than the body. It seeps into thought and memory and breath until everything feels unclean. I carry it with me even when I stand still. I feel stained in ways water cannot reach. When I look at myself I see someone I no longer recognize. Disgust rises easily and it has nowhere to land except inward.
I recoil from what was done to me and from the one who did it. His presence makes my skin remember before my mind can stop it. Yet I am just as repulsed by my own stillness. I did not fight. I did not scream. I remained where I was and let it happen as if my body no longer belonged to me. That obedience feels like another betrayal carved into my bones.
I ask myself why I did not resist. I search for courage and find only exhaustion. I had already learned that resistance invites worse things. Somewhere along the way survival taught me to be quiet. It taught me that endurance hurts less than hope. I hate that lesson. I hate how easily I obeyed it.
What confuses me most is that I am still alive. If he had ended it then the pain would have had an edge. Death would have been simple. Instead I am left to exist in this space between breath and ruin. I cannot understand why he spared me. Mercy feels cruel when it leaves you broken and breathing.
I live with this contradiction gnawing at me. I fear him and I fear myself. I do not know how to cleanse what has been taken. I only know that each day I wake and continue. Not because I am strong. Not because I forgive. I continue because my body insists on living even when my heart does not know how.
END OF PROLOGUE
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