No One Comes Looking

I was eight years old the first time I realized, no one was coming to save me. That I could scream , until my throat bled raw, cry until my eyes swelled shut, beg until my knees bruised- against the floor, and still, no one would come. I learned young that love is selective. that some people are born- with hands that will catch them, and some are born to be dropped. To be ignored. To be told they are too much, too needy, too exhausting to care for. So I learned to be silent. To lock the door- before they could, to swallow my sobs, before they became inconvenient, to stop asking, stop reaching, stop believing that someone, anyone would hold me the way I needed. But that doesn’t stop, the nights when it still hurts. When my body remembers, things my mind won’t let me say. When I lie in bed, and feel like a corpse, something used, something emptied, something that should have been buried, years ago. And no one. comes looking. No one checks under the bed, to make sure I’m still there. No one. stops to wonder where I went. No one. asks why I flinch, why I shrink, why I feel like a ghost, in my own life. I could vanish tomorrow, and the world would go on, like I never existed. And maybe that would be easier. Maybe it would be easier. to become nothing. than to keep pretending, that I was ever something.