There’s a baby being born today.
And it’s not mine.
It’s not my moment, not my miracle, not my name whispered into the hush of a hospital room.
But still, I feel it
like a tremor under my skin,
like a thread snapping somewhere I can’t reach.
I don’t know why it hurts like this.
Only that it does.
Maybe it’s because I thought I’d matter.
Even just a little.
That somehow, some part of me would still live in the echo of this new beginning.
But I don’t.
I’ve been erased so quietly it almost feels surgical.
And I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t crush me.
Today, I miss a man I didn’t even love… not really.
But he felt like a bandage in the shape of a body.
He laid over the wounds Dean left and pretended to be enough
and I let him.
I wanted to be touched by someone who didn’t come with ghosts.
And for a while, he made me forget that I was bleeding.
But now, I want him in the worst way.
Not because I love him,
but because I miss the illusion of being wanted.
I want his silence to break, even if it’s only with a half-hearted ‘hey.’
I want him to notice my absence.
I want him to ache, just once, the way I do.
I know he wasn’t mine.
He was never meant to stay.
But today…
he feels like the absence I didn’t prepare for.
And him… the one who still haunts me?
He’s having a baby today.
A piece of him entering the world,
while I stay quiet in the shadows of a story I wasn’t invited into.
We once dreamed about this.
Not this baby, not that life
but the idea of something that could grow between us.
Something real.
Something sacred.
Now he’s watching someone else give birth to a life I’ll never touch.
And I can’t help but wonder if he remembers me
if somewhere between the sterile hospital lights and the weight of a newborn in his arms,
he thinks about the girl who carried his chaos,
the one who never asked for anything but truth.
I wonder if he feels my absence like a ghost in the room.
Or if he’s finally learned how to forget me.
Either way,
today he became a father again.
And I became something quieter.
Something unmentioned.
Something left behind.
Grief doesn’t scream today.
It hums.
It settles behind my ribs like smoke.
It curls into my throat and doesn’t ask to be swallowed.
It just stays.
Like it knows I won’t tell it to leave.
I haven’t cried in a few days.
I thought maybe that meant I was healing.
But today I realized
I was just holding my breath.
And now I’m letting myself break.
I don’t want comfort.
I don’t want words.
I don’t want to be told I’ll be okay.
I just want to sit in the wreckage of this day and feel every single jagged edge of it.
I want to bleed if I have to.
I want to let the ache hollow me out if it means something new might grow there someday.
I don’t know what tomorrow looks like.
I don’t even know what tonight holds.
But I know I can’t hold this in anymore.
So I’m letting it pour.
The grief.
The ache.
The longing.
The loss of something I never really had to begin with.
Today, a child was born.
And I felt the universe close a door I had been holding open with both hands
trailofchapters 