This piece captures the quiet unraveling of someone standing at the edge of themselves – torn between needing to heal and fearing they never will. Each line is a confession of guilt and survival, trembling yet persistent, revealing the haunting strength of simply still being here.
I’m speaking in fragments –
because the whole me is fracturing.
My pulse is a metronome
counting down my own undoing.
Every choice I make feels like a bruise –
not deep enough to kill,
but enough to remind me I’m still breaking,
Enough to say that I am a disappointment.
Mistakes pile like stones in my chest,
each one whispering, you should have known better,
and I nod, because I did –
and still, I fell.
I say I’m not enough –
and the silence answers: you were never.
Mistakes bleed from my mouth
like confessions I can’t swallow.
I trip over my own shadow,
fall face‑first into regrets,
each one a thorn that keeps me alive
when I want to slip into nothingness.
There’s a ticking beneath my ribs,
a clock wound too tight,
counting down to something I can’t name.
Maybe it’s the moment I finally explode,
or the quiet collapse that goes unheard.
You can call me a ticking time bomb –
because I feel that fuse, burning,
singing my name with every heartbeat.
I don’t know how much longer I can sit still.
I try to stitch myself together
with hope and apology and broken prayers –
but every piece writhes,
refusing to stay whole.
I search for something –
an anchor, a pulse, a single word
to stop the explosion in my chest,
but I grasp only dust and fading echoes.
I whisper: please don’t leave me,
even though I don’t feel worthy
of someone staying.
I’m drowning in my own mistakes,
and I don’t even know how to swim.
If I detonate, I hope someone finds
a spark that wasn’t broken.
Because right now,
I am everything and nothing –
a trembling fuse,
a bleeding mistake,
a heart that doesn’t know where to go.
So I stand here in the flicker –
in the half‑light, half‑dark –
And I keep trying to fix myself
with shaking fingers and borrowed hope,
but everything I touch seems to crack,
and I don’t know what to do with myself anymore.
And still,
I sit here in the aftermath,
ashamed,
aching,
and somehow still alive –
still ticking…
