The Stories I Keep Telling Like They’re Not Mine

In the last six months, I’ve slowly found my way back to writing: songs, poems, pieces of me I didn’t know needed a voice.

It became this silent release. A quiet way to let the thoughts spinning in my head bleed onto the page, without needing to explain them out loud.

The unraveling started a few months ago. The smiles began to crack. The “I’m fine”s stopped holding. And this version of me, the one I created to survive all the trauma, just couldn’t carry the mask anymore.

I still haven’t let myself cry. Not really. Not the way my body probably needs me to.

So I do what I’ve always done: I turn the pain into a story. I talk about it like it’s fiction. Like it belongs to someone else. I tell it so well, even I forget it’s mine.

That’s where this poem came from. From that space between surviving and feeling. From the version of me that’s still afraid to admit how much it actually hurts.

Third Person

I tell it like a story—
Not mine.
Just pages from a book
That someone else lived through.
I speak the pain like it’s fiction,
Like I’m reading lines from a script
Instead of reliving every goddamn scene.

She was hurt, I say.
She was used.
She didn’t know what love was
Because it always walked out
Right before her birthday.

She let him touch her
When she didn’t want to.
She bled, quietly,
In bathrooms and bedrooms
And inside her own silence.
But it’s not me—not really.
It’s just a girl I know.

She survived.
She adapted.
She made jokes,
Wrote songs,
Kept breathing
Because stopping wasn’t an option.

She learned how to say, “I’m fine,”
With a smile that didn’t crack.
She learned how to starve
The parts of her that felt too loud—
Too much.
Too desperate.
Too human.

I keep her close, this girl in the story.
I keep her caged in narrative
So I don’t have to feel her skin
Stretching around pain.
So I don’t have to admit
That her screams live in my throat,
That her numbness is my own.

Because feeling it—really feeling it—
Might be the thing that unravels me.

And I’m scared that if I start
I won’t stop.
That I’ll drown
In everything I’ve locked away
Behind “it wasn’t that bad”
And “at least I made it.”

So I tell the story
From the outside.
As if she is a stranger
And not the echo
In every room I walk into.

But someday…
Maybe I’ll open the book
With trembling hands,
And read it not like a witness
But like a survivor.

Not like fiction.
But like truth.

Not like her.
But like me.

-K