Soft words

I speak because my mouth is an outbound postbox and my past keeps dropping letters through the slit. I speak because there are milestones that look like trophies from the roadside of my life — the leaving, the saying, the walking-out — and they have become small stones I trip on at night. Each milestone is a sentence I owe myself: I regret the things I loved too loudly and the things I guarded with a silence that turned into armour. I regret the promise I stamped with my own cowardice, the way I turned tenderness into debt. I have forgiven backwards — I learned to forgive starting from the wound and tracing the scar to the first nick, untying the knot from the last thread to the first. Forgiveness for me is a reverse-engineering of pain: I take the ending and walk it back into the beginning until the beginning looks less like a trap and more like a doorway. There is an awkwardness that hangs around me like a coat that never quite fits. We were estranged not because of one great betrayal but because of a thousand tiny misplacements of trust: the laugh that landed wrong, the silence answered with silence, the superstition of behaviour that taught us to perform ourselves into small, safe patterns. We ended because ritual replaced conversation; because we believed rules were holy and questions were sinful. The roundabout of our lives — that looping traffic of apologies and promises — became an empire of fools. It glittered with the comfortable lie that if you stayed in the lane long enough you would reach some promised exit. Instead the empire was cut off: bridges removed, signs painted over, a city reduced to small alleys where people avoid one another to preserve their explanations. We reduced ourselves into avoidance; we took loaned affections and refused to pay the interest, so the heart collected debts it could not cash. I cried until the syllables ran dry, until crying felt less like release and more like a vow to repeat the same grief. cried not only for the one who left but for the part of me that stayed behind — the small child who learned to hide feelings like contraband. In that mourning I realized I had been playing a game of my own invention: I Cryptid my own game, made a monster out of play. It started as rules, as a structure to keep me safe — don’t ask, don’t tell, keep count — and it became a myth. But the joke turned: it is no longer a game. It turned into a ledger, and then a blockchain of memory, each block a sealed moment of hurt and habit. My brain became crypto-knowledge: encrypted, overvalued, full of proof-of-work that exhausted me. The dreams I used to pour out as rivers of thought I no longer permit to flow