The Child Still Underneath It

MissT

I don’t feel liked.
Not really.
From my mother’s sharp mouth
to the friends who smile kindly,
nod softly,
then drift sideways out of reach.
My best friend came to all my weddings.
Every hopeful beginning.
Every version of me
dressed in white and trying again.
And when she married the second time,
I didn’t go.
The man I was with didn’t want to.
We lived an hour away.
Life became awkward, busy, complicated
in all the ordinary ways
that quietly harden into permanence.
Now I carry it like a stone in my pocket.
Because I wish, with all my heart,
that I had gone.
We drifted after that.
Not through shouting
or slammed doors.
Just the slow erosion
of people who stop showing up
for each other.
Time changed shape.
We stopped calling as much.
Stopped knowing
the newest versions of ourselves.
And sometimes I sit with the ache of it
and wonder why.
Why do people become strangers
when once they felt unbreakable?
My other best friend became
a different kind of grief.
Anger.
Misunderstandings.
Lies moving like smoke
through old friendships.
She told someone from school things about me,
and that friend erased me
with the tap of a thumb.
Then death arrived before repair could.
So there is no final conversation now.
No clearing of the air.
No chance to discover
maybe we both got it wrong.
Just silence
with a gravestone attached to it.
Then the house emptied further.
My son moved out,
and the echo of him
still lingers in the hallway.
Now the perimeter has shrunk to two:
just me and Kee.
But the quiet isn’t peace.
It sits in the mouldy dishes,
the stale smoke,
the humiliation still clinging to the walls.
Your underwear photographed.
Your car keys hidden
like a childish little punishment.
Stranded in your own life.
Policed inside your own skin.
And then the final rupture:
watching my home smashed apart.
But broken plaster and splintered wood
are only the visible shape of betrayal.
I have been cruel at times.
Sharp-tongued. Defensive.
Capable of burning bridges
while still standing on them.
But sometimes you burn the bridge
because the person on the other side
is already striking matches
inside the house.
And regret is a terrible thing.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just a ghost sitting quietly
at the end of the bed,
asking you to replay old scenes
with different endings.
I speak to my mother again now,
though even that feels strange.
Like visiting a childhood home
after strangers have lived there for years.
We speak carefully,
like people learning each other’s weather.
She said she was cold.
I said, “I’m okay.”
And she laughed lightly and said,
“That’s because you’ve got all that fat on you.”
Such a small sentence.
So quickly spoken.
But some words do not land on the skin.
They land in the child
still living underneath it.
And maybe that is what sensitivity is.
Not weakness.
Not drama.
Just years of carrying
every careless word,
every violation,
every broken room,
without ever being taught
where to safely put them down.