At What Cost

My parents didn’t teach me love— I learned it from the silence. My mother never asked why my eyes were red. She looked, but never really saw. My father only noticed me when I made a mistake. Love, in our house, was conditional. Thin. Breakable. Absent. So I taught myself how to hug my own shoulders when no one else reached out. How to whisper "it's okay" when the shouting outside made the inside of me tremble. I learned to wipe my own tears before they stained the floor, before someone saw and called it weakness. I held my own hand when the weight of the world pressed down like a roof caving in. I taught myself how to survive— how to exist in a house that never felt like home. And I survived. But at what cost?