I watch the world sprint by—

everyone else reaching milestones like checkpoints

on a race I never started.

Graduations, promotions, weddings… a family.

their lives stacking achievements

while I’m here

just trying to get

They call it rare,

like it’s something precious.

But there’s no gold in this isolation,

no treasure in the silence

of empty waiting

Some days, hope rises,

a fragile whisper that maybe, just maybe,

there’s a world beyond this cage.

The pain shrinks to the edges,

a shadow you can almost

Some days, hope rises,

a fragile whisper that maybe, just maybe,

there’s a world beyond this cage.

The pain shrinks to the edges,

a shadow you can almost ignore.

But today is not that day.

Today, I am drowning,

dragged under by waves

of relentless

The tree still glows, its branches dressed in light,

But shadows linger deep inside tonight.

This is the second Christmas I’ve endured,

Where joy feels distant, stolen, obscured.

I am barely here—my

This weekend I was at selling at Oddmall, a huge vendor event hosted at the fairgrounds. After last year’s success, I was starting to feel quite disappointed with the results of this weekend - I was in so much pain, hardly

You promised me safety,  

swore you’d protect me from the dark,  

but it was your hands,  

your voice,

I want to live,  

not just survive,  

not just tread water,  

gasping for breath in the ocean of a body that feels like it's betraying me.  

I want to live.  

Not in the numbness of "getting

I’m made of glass.

Thin. Brittle. Fragile.

Every step is like a gamble with gravity—joints slipping from their sockets like they were never meant to stay,

like my body forgot how to hold itself together.

I wake up, and the first

I’m dying.

It’s not a matter of if, but when—

my body is betraying me,

cells turning rogue, organs fading,

pain etching itself into

I wake up in a body that feels borrowed,  

stitched together with fragile thread,  

ready to unravel at the seams.  

My joints slip like they’re strangers to each other—  

a shoulder pops out when I reach,  

a knee buckles when I stand,  

and I’m just left holding myself together  

like broken glass...

I wake up each day,  knowing that I'm rare—  

but not the kind of rare you frame on a wall  

or keep locked in a glass case.  

I am rare in the way that no one understands,  

no one knows