for the one I couldn’t keep.

You held on when you weren’t supposed to. Still there, still breathing, still becoming — while I was already drowning in everything they needed me to be.

When I found you again, the world had already made its decision. No ground. No one. Only the weight of everyone else where you should have been.

I didn’t let you go. I had nothing left to hold you with.

And yet you never fully left. That heartbeat — threatening, tender, impossible — still lives inside my chest. It bites. It beats. Every breath. Every day. The one that stayed when everything else abandoned me, and the one I couldn’t save.

Ever since, I have been breathing halfway.
To every child — held and otherwise. To the child still living somewhere inside you, reading this.

Live yours.

I haven’t learned to live yet.

— from my interior