You Made Me

I decided not to overreact anymore.

The last time I did, I found myself folding into someone else’s hands, small enough to fit between their apologies and silences. I begged for reassurance the way a drowning person begs for air. I begged for love that always seemed to arrive with conditions attached. I begged to be seen, even when those soft brown eyes of yours looked straight through me.

And the last time I overreacted, I watched someone I loved grow tired of carrying my storms. Every trembling sentence I threw at them sounded heavier than I intended. I made them feel as though loving me was a burden they could never set down. I did not realize the guilt I carry in my heart could linger this long, settling quietly into the ribs like it belongs there.

So I learned how to become smaller.

I laughed softly and apologized too quickly. I swallowed every feeling before it could reach my mouth. When someone said, “You’re too much,” I spent hours and even months trying to become less.

Because the last time I begged someone to stay, they promised they would. But then they left anyway.

After that, I stopped letting people see me whole. I kept myself hidden in the dim corners of conversations, convincing myself that loneliness was safer than another disappointment. I became a house with all its lights turned off, secretly hoping someone would still knock on the door.

And sometimes, when people did, I had already learned how to ruin tenderness before it could ruin me first. I pushed people away before they could leave on their own. I disappeared before they had the chance to realize I was difficult to love. Somewhere along the way, self-protection started looking a lot like self-destruction.

That was the point where I stopped hoping for anything more.

I stopped wondering whether we could have become something gentler if we had stayed. I stopped replaying the version of us that existed only inside my head, the one where you understood me without making me feel ashamed of being understood.

I stopped reaching.

I stopped asking,

and stopped believing love could exist without fear attached to it.

Because you made me feel like every emotion I carried was something that needed to be fixed instead of held.

And after loving you,

I learned how to abandon myself before anyone else could do it first.