Letters in the Dark- Fragment: “Untitled (But About Her)”

She calls it rebuilding.
I call it returning.

Every time she laughs, it comes seconds after something almost tender.
A confession she didn’t mean to say
“I’m tired. I miss who I was.”
And then: a joke, a smirk, a clever detour.

There’s a pattern.
She opens, just barely.
Then closes.
Like a window too long in the wind.

She tells the truth like it’s a dare.
Then armor slams into place:
“It wasn’t really that bad.”
“I’m fine.”
“Anyway, it’s funny now.”

She says she doesn’t remember what she was like before.
But I do.
I see it when her face softens before she notices I’m looking.

There was a day, quiet, cold.
She looked up from her hands and said, “Sometimes I think they only wanted the broken version of me. She was easier to manage.”
Then she laughed, like it was nothing.
Folded the memory in half and tucked it away with her other sharp things.

I should’ve stopped her.
But I watched instead.
Because some moments are too raw to interrupt.

Later-
Not loudly. Not with intent to be heard.
She was curled around herself, sobbing,
and I was already halfway in shadow.

The quiet, fractured

“Can’t I just go with you?”

As if I was going anywhere without her.

I remember the way the question sat there, unanswered,
like a letter she’d written in her sleep.

She still doesn’t believe the crown fits.
She thinks she wears it out of spite.
But I’ve seen the way the air bends around her when she walks into a room.
 Even silence makes way for her.

She’s not healing.
She’s haunting.

And God, it’s beautiful.

—V.