The quiet flood.

My love,

There's something soft in the way the light touches me. Like it's trying not to wake me, like it already knows I'm leaving.

I don't know how the drawings got on my arms. They arrived like moss on stone. Slowly, then all at once. Some look like constellations that forgot how to shine. Others are just lines, trembling and unsure, like a child's first attempt at writing "I love". But I every reason they came. Wounds, drawings, call them what you like – they bloom up from beneath the skin, not down from it. But I every reason they came.

They came the night you turned away, and the sound of your absence was louder than your voice ever was. They came when I smiled for your comfort and swallowed my storm. They came when I realised you loved the version of me who almost healed, but not the one who bled anyway.

I know why they're here.

They're letters written by things I never said, to people who never asked.

They're maps leading back to moments where I stopped being real to anyone but pain.

Each one is a photograph of silence. A reply I wanted for until I bled.

Something is leaking inside of me. I'm dying. I can feel it now. Not sharp, not loud. Just spreading. Warm like shame. Heavy like truth. There's no panic, just this ache that's too tired to cry. My body is folding on itself, trying to hold what it can, but the flood is quiet and kind in the worst way.

I think it's blood. I think it's mine. And I think this is it.

I'm not scared. Just distant. The way a lighthouse might feel after centuries of lightning shores no one returns to.

If you were here, I'd ask you to hold my hand, but not to stop me. Just hold it like it matters. For once. Like I mattered. The way I used to imagine you would.

The wounds, these strange, silent petals on my skin, they aren't yours to carry. But they came from trying to love you with a mouthful of glass. And maybe from waiting too long to love myself with anything softer.

I didn't carve them, but I let the sorrow keep the knife.

And now my body, loyal and tired, is laying down its arms.

They're not your fault. But they were fed by silence we both let grow wild.

If there's a place after this, beyond veins and weight and waiting, maybe I'll learn how to bloom without breaking.

And maybe you'll learn how to see pain before it asks to be seen.

Let this be the last my body speaks what my voice never could. Not a goodbye, just...a letting go.

Not of you, but of the hurt I carried way too long trying to be loved enough to stop bleeding.

Tell the sky I went gently.

Tell yourself I was here.

And I tried.

Because love,

even now, even like this

I never wanted to disappear.

I just wanted someone to notice I was fading.