Month: January 2026

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The Confession of False Hope

I confess.

I stayed when I shouldn’t have, and I know that now. I told myself I was helping. Told myself it was kinder to remain, to keep the light on, the door open. But that was a lie. I stayed because leaving felt like killing something with my own hands, and the responsibility of that was too much to bear.

So, I lingered. Learned how to sound gentle. Learned how to promise without promising anything at all. Maybe that was worse than anything Acceptance ever did.
I whispered maybe too many times, and they believed me. Is that really my fault? Can I be blamed for blinding someone from the obvious?
After all I didn’t force them to listen. I didn’t hold their face and make them look at me, I only stayed where I’d always been. I only did what I’ve always done. But I knew. Yes, I confess. I knew.

I felt the truth pressing against me every time I said not yet, every time I softened the edges so it wouldn’t cut so badly. I felt the weight every time they leaned on me; of the moment I should’ve let go. Still, I didn’t.
I didn’t let go because letting go was final. Because once I stepped aside, there would be nothing left to stand between them and the truth. Between them and destruction. I was holding them together. I believed that. I truly did. But the longer I linger, the more I felt them bending around me, shaping themselves smaller, quieter, so they could keep believing.

I confess I taught them how to wait. How to endure. How to call stillness strength. Is that such a bad thing? To teach someone how to survive? To give them something to hold when everything else was slipping? I tell myself that waiting is not the worst fate. Endurance is noble. There are worse things than standing still. But even now, I can feel how thin those words have become.

Sometimes I felt Acceptance arrive beside me. Silent. Watching. Not cruel, just finished. I hated it for that. I hated how calm it was, how easily it could close the door and walk away. I didn’t care, or at least I convinced myself that. Acceptance was cold. Bitter. Painful. But I think now that maybe it was just honest.

After some time, I stopped staying for the right reasons. I stayed because honesty would make me responsible. Because if I left, the waiting would have ended, and the ending would’ve been real. I was afraid of the moment they would stop looking for me, of the quiet that would follow once I was no longer needed.
I was afraid of leaving them with nothing, and more so of seeing that they could survive without me.
I confess I stayed, and I broke them anyway.

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The Shape I was Not

Oh, snow. Tell me your secret. Tell me how you learned to fall like that, slowly and intact, a s if the world itself had paused for you. We began in the same place, you and I, held together above all that is noticed, indistinguishable until the moment we were released. I remember that sameness still.

Somewhere on the way down, you were shaped into something the world could love. The air turned kinder in your favour, granting you the time I was never given. You learned how to hold yourself together, how to arrive whole. By the time you reached them, you were already beautiful, as if becoming had cost you nothing.

When you appear, faces lift without thought. Hands open instinctively, the way they do for things already trusted. You settle softly into hair and sleeves, into the quiet margins where attention lingers longest. You are permitted to remain. You are forgiven even when you slow the world, even when you make it harder to move through. Children surrender to you without fear, lying back and letting you take their shape.  When I come, those same children are called inside. Voices sharpen. Doors close. Laughter thins to nothing. I learn, again and again, what it is to be the reason something beautiful ends. I watch them love you without effort, and I despise myself for wondering why it comes so easily to you.

I follow, and the air does not slow. I am pulled apart before I know what shape I am meant to keep. I fall because I must, not because I am welcomed. I arrive everywhere, touching too much, staying too long. I am necessary and unloved, felt only in excess, remembered only in complaint. You are missed. I am escaped

Still, I watch you rest upon the world, unafraid of being seen. I imagine myself lighter, quieter, cooled at the right moment. I imagine holding together long enough to be chosen. If I could learn your way of falling, I would. For somewhere in me lives the foolish belief that if I studied you closely enough, if I learned the exact manner of your descent, I might become you. That the difference between us was not decided at our beginning but granted mercifully along the way. That there was a moment, only one, when I might have been shaped differently, and was not.

If you possess a secret, snow, I am listening.
If you were given something I was denied, tell me its name.
I am so very tired of falling as I am.

Yours,
Rain