Who am I?

Perhaps I am nothing more than fragments trying to remember what they belonged to.

Unfinished Rooms

I have spent long nights lying awake,

trying to answer the question:

“Who am I?”

But no matter how often I circle it,

the answer refuses to land.

Instead,

what I’ve found,

often painfully, sometimes quietly,

is who I no longer wish to be.

The woman who paints over her pain in shades of denial,

silences her fire out of fear it might burn too bright,

and drowns her sorrow in bottles,

leaving behind only a trail of glass and heartbreak.

The one who recoils from love as if it were poisonous,

and pushes away the people trying to hold her with care.

Still,

I am heartbroken by the damage I’ve caused,

the hearts I’ve scraped raw,

and the people I’ve hurt in my undoing.

I remember standing at my preschool graduation,

clutching a certificate I didn’t care about,

scanning the crowd for my mother,

her absence a palpable void.

The world stopped that day.

Everything went quiet.

And I began to quietly invent soft creations in my head.

I imagined her smile,

and how proud she might have looked.

I began living inside my head,

rewriting reality into something bearable,

and inventing joy where absence lived.

“You need to figure out who you want to be,”

my psychologist tells me.

I haven’t created that image yet.

Not fully.

The image of who I want to be is still forming.

But I imagine it tastes like bread dipped in minestrone.

Oreos softened in warm milk.

Smells like sea air; fresh, briny, wild.

Sounds like laughter breaking through chaos,

dancing, even while crying, among people who love her.

I imagine she sits at the back of a crowd.

Or maybe the front.

Listening to live jazz,

letting the melodies speak where words cannot —

through saxophone, violin, and piano keys,

until something inside her loosens.

She loves music.

She loves words.

She is learning how to let them hold her without breaking her.

I think she is still the little girl,

looking for her mother in the crowd,

sitting at the front of her house,

watching the street ahead,

waiting.

Still shaped by a house that almost swallowed her whole,

and still trying, quietly, to understand how to finish what was never complete.

And in the space between what was and what is becoming,

there are fragments.

Lived truths.

Quiet inventions.

And everything that exists outside these rooms.

Until then,

I return to this one truth:

I go back to the first moment I remember pausing when it all felt unbearable;

the girl searching the crowd for her mother,

and this time,

I press play.

Not pausing.

Not anymore.

This blog is where I gather the fragments:

lived truths, quiet inventions,

and everything that lingers beyond what I thought I had left behind.

For now,

I am still living in that house.

Thank you for being part of this journey with me.

Your eyes, even in passing, matter more than I can say.

If my words find you,

mentally, emotionally,

somewhere in between,

or nowhere at all,

may they meet you gently.

And in tenderness.