Fawnlight & Footnotes

If you’re waiting for me to open myself like a door left swinging, you will be waiting a long time. I don’t open like that. I fracture. I thin. I go translucent around the edges and let the light hurt me quietly.

This is me being honest with you.

I have learned that truth is not always kind to the body it lives in. That once spoken, it learns how to echo. How to come back altered. How to ask for more than you meant to give. Some words, once released, never stop taking. That is not absence. That is presence under restraint.

I am honest about being soft in a world that crushes softness for sport. Honest about how noise bruises me. How memory has weight. How staying visible for too long feels like standing under a blade and pretending it’s sunlight. Sometimes I vanish. Not dramatically. Not loudly. I just step sideways out of myself and hope no one follows. That, too, is honesty.

I don’t believe in flaying myself open for proof. I don’t believe pain becomes more legitimate once witnessed. I have seen how quickly people learn to love the wound and not the person carrying it. I won’t let that be my offering.

What I give you instead is this: the tremor beneath the sentence. The ache that never quite resolves. The truth told slant, so it doesn’t finish me.

If you read slowly, you’ll feel it press against the words – something unspeakable, but alive. Something that has survived by learning how to live in metaphor, how to curl up inside commas, how to pass as quiet. This space exists because I chose survival over revelation. Because I wanted to keep writing without disappearing entirely. Because some truths don’t want witnesses – they want shelter.

So, if you’re here, and you feel close but not close enough, understand this: I am not distant. I am careful. And if it hurts to realise you will never have all of me, imagine what it costs to live inside something that would not survive being fully told. Because the most honest thing about me is this – there are parts of my life that only exist because I never said them out loud.