Bet She Never Felt More Free
Does Knowing Me Mean Loving Me Less?
The question lives in me like a rusted nail driven too deep to pull free: does knowing me more always lead to loving me less? I’ve asked it after every departure. Be it lover, friend, it makes no difference. The story always unfolds the same. I lift the curtain, just enough for them to glimpse the wreckage behind my practiced smile, and I can feel it immediately… the atmosphere thickening, the inevitable shift. Their eyes change first, softening into pity or hardening into distance, and I know it’s only a matter of time before their footsteps follow. So I stopped handing people the keys to the locked rooms inside me. I stopped offering the truth behind the scripted smiles and carefully curated jokes. If they only love the surface, maybe they’ll stay long enough to keep me from splintering completely. Maybe if I keep the underbelly hidden, I won’t have to watch them recoil when they realize how dark the marrow of me really is.
No one warns you about the kind of depression that doesn’t make noise. Not the sobbing, not the breakdowns, not the jagged lines on skin or the frantic panic clawing at your chest. Those are loud enough to be noticed, to be named. What no one talks about is the silence, the kind that crawls into your body and turns you into a ghost while you’re still breathing. My mind, usually a relentless carnival of “what ifs” and “you should have knowns,” suddenly goes mute. And that silence is more terrifying than the chaos ever was. Because the storm, for all its violence, meant I was still alive enough to fight. The silence means the fight has bled out of me. It means I’ve stopped reaching for shore and started sinking with open arms, letting the water take me under. The quiet isn’t peace. It’s surrender.
People mistake depression for sadness, but sadness is still tethered to desire… it reaches, it aches, it longs for something just out of reach. What I feel is not longing. It is the absence of it. This is not sadness; this is vacancy. A hollow that hums through my bones like static, a disconnection so sharp it feels like I am being erased from the inside out. I don’t cry. I don’t scream. I don’t rage against the emptiness. I simply stop wanting. Food turns to ash. Conversation echoes without meaning. Music becomes just noise. Even the things I once swore were the stitches holding me together unravel quietly, slipping from my grasp without protest. And I don’t even have the strength to miss them. I lie in bed, or sit motionless in a room where the walls feel more alive than I do, waiting for something, anything, to spark. Waiting for the tide to turn and remind me I am still tethered to life. But nothing shifts. Nothing returns. The tide stays out, and I am left stranded on the shore, gathering dust.
And then comes the guilt, creeping in like smoke through the cracks, suffocating what little air I have left. With each sharping of his blade, the voice hisses: you should care. You should try harder. You should want to be here more than this. Each should is a stone strapped to my back, dragging me down into waters I can’t wade through. The shoulds pile up like stones in my pockets until I am sinking fast, lungs burning, body thrashing for air I can no longer reach. I’ve carried them for so long that my spine feels splintered, my body bowed from the weight of expectations I can never meet. My arms are raw from reaching toward a life that never reaches back. My chest aches from the endless performance of breath… this fragile rising and falling, not for joy, not for meaning, but for the bare mechanics of survival. I am exhausted from pretending I still know how to live, when all I’m doing is rehearsing the motions of being alive. I am not breathing to live anymore, I am breathing the way a drowning body still kicks in the water… this is just reflex, there’s no hope involved anymore. But the worst part isn’t the drowning, it’s the moment the thrashing stops. The moment my body stops demanding breath. When the water turns eerily calm and the silence settles in. That silence is the most dangerous thing I know, because it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t scream. It feels like release. It feels like an invitation I’m too tired to decline. It feels like finally letting go of a fight I was never meant to win.
The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live. It is the part of ourselves that rots quietly, unnoticed, beneath the surface, while the world keeps spinning. It is the ember of hope snuffed out by indifference, the small pulse of desire that faded because no one reached for it. It is the hollow that grows with every promise broken, every hand that pulled away when we thought we were held. We continue to move, speak, breathe… but inside, we are a graveyard, full of the selves we buried long ago to survive. The laughter that escapes our lips is a mask, the smiles are tombstones marking what we have already lost. And the worst part is the knowledge that it cannot be exhumed. The dead inside us do not return. They lie still, a darkness we carry alive, and it grows heavier with each passing day. And the longer you live, the more you feel it tighten its grip, an ever-present reminder that the parts of you that should have thrived have already died, leaving you hollow, haunted, and breathing only because the living must, not because the soul inside you has anything left to fight with.
I think about death often. Not in sudden, violent flashes of terror, but as a presence that waits quietly, unshakable, patient. It comes without pretense, without lies, without empty promises… with the kind of gentleness I’ve ached for my whole life. It knows me in a way no one else ever has, and it keeps its word. When it finally reaches for me, I imagine it does not drag or demand, but simply extends its hand with calm certainty, lacing its fingers through mine as if it knows every burden I’ve carried and why I can’t keep holding them… as if it has always known exactly how heavy the world has been on my shoulders. Its voice, if it chooses to speak, is low and unwavering: “Come now, your fight is done.” It does not bargain. It does not falter. It does not flinch at the weight I’ve carried. It takes the burden without hesitation and lets me rest beneath the quiet it offers, a quiet I have never found in anyone else, a quiet that is absolute, honest, and whole. For the first time, I feel that a promise might actually be kept. I’ll believe it when it says I don’t have to be strong anymore. It terrifies me, and comforts me, and calls me all at once.
"This must be how Noccalula felt, huh? Bet she never felt more free".
When death does come for me, I will let it sweep over me like cold, irresistible water pulling me under, leaving me weightless, leaving only the quiet I’ve chased my whole life. When it comes, I will lean into it, letting it trace the curves of my fear and exhaustion, letting it drag me down with a mercy no one else has ever given, until the world and I dissolve together into the still, absolute quiet it promises.
"Bet she never felt more free".
