Born Under a Black Star

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been cursed. Not in some romantic, storybook way, but in a blood-forged, bone-deep kind of way. Like I was hexed before I ever took my first breath, doomed from birth to be the one the shadows follow. It doesn’t feel like bad luck. It feels like some grand design. Like some ancient force with cold hands and cruel eyes pointed at me and said, Her. That one. Let her carry the ruin. Like there was a cosmic roulette wheel spinning in the dark, and my name was etched into every single slot. I don’t know how else to explain the way grief keeps finding me, breaking me open again and again like it enjoys the sound. Like my suffering is some kind of currency in a system I never agreed to participate in. Like I was born owing something I never borrowed.

My grandpa died in January. The man who helped raise me. Who gave structure to the chaos, who was the roof over my head and the ground beneath my feet. When he died, it felt like the axis shifted, like the blueprint of my life had been swallowed by an earthquake I didn’t saw coming. The foundation cracked and I fell through it. 

I was still crawling through that rubble, still gasping through the dust of it all, when four months later, I found my mother dead in her car. On Mother’s Day. I don’t even have language for what that did to me. That sentence alone feels like it should belong to someone else's horror story, but it's mine. It’s carved into me. I’ve been branded by it.

But whatever force had its claws in me wasn’t finished. Four months later, our niece died. A burst of light ripped out of the world with no warning. One second she was here, and the next I was standing in another funeral line, blinking into the darkness, trying to make sense of yet another cruel goodbye.

And then, a year later, my brother, my best friend, my soul twin took his own life. He was my everything. The one person who saw me without explanation. Who spoke in the same unintelligible language, who felt the ache in me before I ever said a word. We weren’t just siblings, we were made of the same storm. When he pulled that trigger, he didn’t just end his life. He took mine with him. Not all of it. Just the part that laughed without guilt. The part that believed in safe places. The part that trusted the world wouldn’t always take what I loved. Something in me shattered that day, a rupture so deep it doesn’t scar, it gapes. There are moments I still reach for my phone to text him, only to remember I’m talking to a ghost. Moments I feel him so close I swear he’s in the room, and others where the silence is so deafening it feels like I’ve gone mad. He left and I was forced to stay. But I wasn’t spared. I was sentenced to the kind of grief that doesn’t heal, just rearranges you into something you never agreed to become.

It feels like the universe is peeling the skin from my body one loved one at a time. Not a random storm. Not a twist of fate. No, this definitely feels personal. Like something ancient has chosen me to bleed for it. Like I was born under some blackened star and every loss was part of a prophecy I never agreed to fulfill. Like I’m being gutted slowly, ceremoniously, by something that wants me to suffer loud and long. I keep thinking this has to be it. Surely this is where the curse lifts, where the air clears, where whatever god or demon is orchestrating this finally gets bored and moves on. When I’ve mentally bled enough and it’s collected it’s dues. But it doesn’t. It never does. The hits keep coming with surgical precision. And I realize this isn’t chaos. This is intention. It’s like I’m being stalked by the grim reaper itself. Like grief has memorized the names of everyone I love and is taking them one by one… not just to break me, but to hollow me out. To see what would be left when there’s nothing left. To burn my life down slowly, just to watch the way I suffocate in the ashes.

Four sharp, separate blades and every one of them finds the same soft, scarred places. They don’t just cut, they carve open the healing with intention, like they know exactly where I’m weakest. Like they’ve been here before. Like I was made for this kind of pain. And after a while, I start to believe it. I start to believe I am cursed. How else do you explain this kind of relentless devastation? How else do you survive losing your entire world in jagged pieces so close together that your heart never even gets the chance to clot? 

Tell me how that isn’t personal. Tell me how I’m supposed to keep breathing when every time I find my footing, the ground vanishes beneath me. People talk about grief like it’s a storm that eventually passes. Mine doesn’t pass. It lingers. It thickens. It climbs on top of me like a living thing, like it wants to wear me. It doesn’t crash, it drowns. It doesn’t ease, it devours. Grief isn’t something I move through, it’s something that’s moved into me and set up camp. It’s in my joints, my breath, the way I flinch when the phone rings. It rewires my body like it’s trying to claim ownership. I carry it like a parasite that feeds off memory. It shapes how I speak, how I move, how I sleep… if I sleep. Grief stopped being a wave a long time ago. Now it is the ocean. And I’m stuck under it, lungs full of saltwater, blinking through darkness.

I sit in the bathroom sometimes, lights off, palms trembling in my lap, and I ask questions I’m terrified of the answers. What did I do to deserve this? Who did I betray before I was even born? What cosmic rule did I break to be punished like this? Sometimes I don’t just fear I’m being targeted, I know it. I feel it in my bones, in the static under my skin. Like something ancient and cruel has its eye on me, watching from behind the veil, leaning in closer every time I lose someone. Testing. Toying. Whispering, let’s see if she survives this one. Like it’s a game. Like I’m the sacrifice and it wants to see how long it takes before I finally come completely undone. And the truth, the one I can’t say out loud, is that most days, I don’t want to survive it. Most days, I’m just so fucking tired. Tired in my marrow. Tired in the way a haunted house creaks after years of storms trying desperately to knock it to its foundation. Tired of pretending I’m okay. Of dragging my body through the motions. Of pasting on normalcy like a mask that doesn’t fit anymore. Of performing like I’m whole when inside, I am just splinters barely holding shape.

It feels like I’m living under surveillance. Like this thing, whatever it is, is watching how long I’ll keep standing while it tears everything I love out from under me. And still, I show up. I breathe. I eat. I answer texts. I smile at strangers. I play the part. But none of it feels real. I feel like a shadow pretending to be a person. And some nights, I wonder if maybe I already did snap. Maybe the part of me that mattered is already gone, and this is just the leftover shell, going through the motions while something laughs behind the curtain.
I’m furious. Not the quiet kind of anger you can tuck away. I’m burning, blazing with a rage that hollows me out from the inside. Angry that I never get a moment’s peace, never a breath between the bodies I’m forced to bury. No time to grieve one loss before another is shoved into my arms like a fresh wound. People tell me I’m strong, like that’s some kind of gold medal I earned for surviving hell. But what they don’t see is that I should never have been made to endure any of this at all.

I’ve questioned everything, my faith, my sanity, my very will to keep dragging myself forward. Some days, I’m walking through life dragging a corpse behind me. My own. It’s like the weight of what I’ve lost is stitched to my skin, and every step pulls the stitches tighter. There are mornings I wake up and the world feels like a stone pressing down on my chest. I wonder how I’m supposed to keep moving, keep breathing, keep existing when my soul feels cracked open and bleeding out. How much more do they want from me? How much more can I take before I shatter completely?

I’ve begged the sky to shut its mouth, to stop raining loss down. I’ve screamed into the void, daring it to answer, to explain why I’m the one chosen to break this many times. I’ve imagined vanishing, slipping away into silence, not because I want to die, but because living feels like an insult. I carry this anger like a torch and a chain, both burning me and binding me in the same breath. It’s a fire I didn’t ask for, but one I can’t let go of. Strong feels like an insult.

Every time I think I’m catching my breath, the next blow swings like a hammer to my ribs. I’ve stood at too many graves, watching the people I love lowered into the dirt while I blink through the numbness, wondering if I’m next. But this curse, it doesn’t want me gone. It wants me watching. It wants me broken, tethered to fear, forced to live in a slow death of anxiety. I look around at what I left and I can’t help but think, so which one of them is next? I live every day in the shadow of that question, like a predator pacing behind me, waiting. Scared that this is all life will ever be for me, that the worst might have passed, or maybe it’s still stalking just beyond the corner. Maybe I’ll lose someone else. Maybe the safety I crave was never mine to begin with. Maybe I was never meant to feel safe at all.

I don’t want advice. I don’t want a silver lining, a prayer, or some hollow promise that it’ll all make sense someday. I just want to say it loud enough to shatter the silence: this. fucking. sucks. I’m drowning in it, going deep under, gasping for air that never comes. And I don’t know how much more I can carry. Hell, I don’t even know why I’m still trying to swim at all.

And some nights, the scariest thought is the one that feels the most true, maybe there is no reason for any of this. Maybe this is just how it is, chaotic, cruel, and indifferent. The other day it slipped out, “It feels like I’ve been cursed since birth.” My voice cracked when I said it, like the truth had been sitting in my throat for years. And they laughed, casually. Said, “The universe doesn’t care about you that much”.

How is that any better if they’re right? What if it’s not some ancient curse stitched into my bloodline because of something unspeakable my ancestors did? Not fate. Not consequence. What if it’s worse… what if there’s nothing at all? Nothing watching. Nothing guiding. Nothing listening. No grand design. No hidden meaning.

What if the pain isn’t purposeful, it’s just pointless? What if I wasn’t marked, I was just missed? Just... overlooked. Forgotten by whatever force was supposed to keep me safe. Left behind in the margins like a smudge in the corner of a page that no one ever cared to finish writing. Maybe there was never a curse. Maybe this is just what it looks like when no one shows up. When no one stops it. Maybe the universe really doesn’t care about me at all. Maybe it never did.

Maybe I wasn’t chosen for suffering, maybe I was abandoned to it. Maybe I was never being tested or refined or made into anything at all. Maybe I was just collateral damage in a world too chaotic to notice.

Maybe I was always meant to suffer.

Maybe that’s my whole story.

And maybe the most brutal part is that I’ll never know. I just keep surviving. Alone, angry, hollowed out. Telling myself it has to mean something. Because the alternative? That it means nothing?

That might be the cruelest curse of all.

Author’s note:
Originally written February 19, 2019. What if Surviving Is the Punishment?

I wrote this in the ruins, when hope felt like a language I no longer spoke, when it felt like the universe had carved my name into a list that it read from slowly, cruelly, and deliberately. When I was bone-deep in grief, fury, and exhaustion, clawing through every day like it owed me something it would never give back. These words came from the nights I screamed into pillows and silence. From the shower floor, where I learned what it means to grieve without making any sound, because the rest of the world had already moved on. From the quiet hell of surviving yet another thing that should have killed me.

And even now, years later, I come back to these pages like a ghost returning to the place it died. And I still feel it. Every word of it. The pain hasn’t vanished. Grief still walks beside me, barefoot and faithful. I still flinch when certain names show up on my phone. I still have days where I wonder how I’m supposed to keep waking up in a world where so many people I love no longer exist. There are still moments when I sit in the dark and ask the same questions, terrified of the answers. The curse I once believed in? Yea, I still do. But I also believe that maybe I’m just deeply, devastatingly human. Time hasn’t healed me. But it stretched the pain, like fabric pulled thin enough to let light through. And that light, however faint, reminds me that I’m still here. Not whole, but breathing. Not healed, but becoming. Not free of the weight, but strong enough to carry it differently. It gave me enough space to breathe again. It gave me the understanding that this deep-seated level of grief doesn’t mean I’m broken. It means I loved. So deeply, so fully, that it rearranged me when it was taken from me.

If I was cursed, I’ve made poetry out of it. If I was forgotten, I’ve made myself seen. If I was left behind, I’ve made it count. And maybe that’s what survival really is… not a triumph, but a slow-burning refusal to stop feeling, even when it hurts.

And yes, I still do my good deeds quietly, like I’m trying to bribe the universe into leaving me alone for a while. I still look over my shoulder every time I kill a bug and apologize to inanimate objects, just in case my karma tab is still open. I try to keep that clean, just in case the universe is petty enough to keep receipts. I have to keep the universe from flipping another table on me.

Hey, you never know. I’ve lived too much life to risk intentionally testing it.