Crow and Flame

There are versions of me

that did not make it here.

Not in the dramatic, visible way people expect—

not in a single moment of collapse—

but in quiet, unmarked endings.

They disappeared slowly.

Piece by piece.

Choice by choice.

Silence by silence.

There was a version of me who trusted easily.

She believed words at face value,

held them gently like something sacred.

She did not yet know

that words could be weapons,

or that love could arrive dressed as harm.

She did not survive.

There was a version of me who stayed too long.

Who bent and reshaped herself

into something more acceptable,

more digestible,

more lovable.

She learned how to read the room

before she ever learned how to read herself.

She called it compassion.

She called it patience.

She called it love.

It was survival.

She did not survive either.

There was a version of me

who believed everything was her fault.

Every shift in tone.

Every withdrawal of affection.

Every fracture in connection.

She carried blame like a second skin,

wore it so often it began to feel like identity.

If something hurt,

she assumed she deserved it.

If something broke,

she assumed she was the reason.

She didn’t survive.

And then there was the version of me

who stopped dreaming.

Who made her world smaller

so disappointment wouldn’t feel so large.

Who tucked away her desires

like fragile glass—

too dangerous to hold,

too painful to lose.

She convinced herself

that wanting less

was the same as healing.

It wasn’t.

She is gone now, too.

Grief is a strange thing.

No one teaches you

how to mourn the people you used to be.

There are no funerals

for identities that dissolve in silence.

No rituals

for the selves that carried you through fire

but were never meant to live in the light.

But I feel them sometimes—

in the ache behind certain memories,

in the reflex to shrink,

in the instinct to apologize

for things that were never mine to carry.

They echo.

Not because I want them back,

but because they were real.

Because they mattered.

Because they kept me alive.

Becoming someone new

is not a clean transformation.

It is a shedding.

A burning.

A quiet unraveling of everything

you once believed you had to be

in order to survive.

And there is grief in that.

Even when the becoming is beautiful.

Even when the freedom is real.

I am not who I was.

But I am made of her.

Of all of them.

The trusting one.

The shrinking one.

The silent one.

The one who endured what she should never have had to.

They did not survive—

but they built something that did.

And maybe that’s the truth we don’t say out loud:

Sometimes growth

is not about becoming more.

Sometimes

it is about honoring

everything that had to fall away

so you could finally stand.