Glimpses

Every time I pick up my phone,

there is a pause

a hesitation

a familiar hum under my ribs

like something ancient waking.

My thumb hovers over a name

not a person, not anymore

but the memory

of wanting to be chosen.

There are two voices in me always:

“Just reach out.”

gentle, hopeful,

the child who still believes connection is possible.

and

“Don’t do this again.”

tired, steady,

the version of me who has lived through the aftermath

too many times to count.

And neither voice is wrong.

Neither voice is the enemy.

They are sisters in survival.

Because this isn’t about one person.

It never was.

This is every friend,

every almost-lover,

every “I care about you but not enough to show up.”

This is a lifetime

of being the warm room

everyone steps into

when they’re cold

but never the home they stay in.

And I know exactly when it began.

When I was a child.

The girl with galaxies behind her eyes,

the one teachers never knew how to handle.

I was too imaginative,

too intuitive,

always somewhere else

somewhere deeper.

While other kids memorized spelling words,

I was busy reading the temperature of the room,

feeling the undercurrents of emotion,

learning to detect disappointment

in the smallest flicker of a face.

I could feel what people didn’t say.

I could sense withdrawal

before it happened.

I could tell when love was cooling

before the first chill reached the air.

My teachers called it daydreaming.

Distracted.

Not focused.

Disruptive.

But I was paying attention

to things they had forgotten how to see.

They wanted me to be less.

Less imaginative.

Less emotional.

Less loud in spirit.

Less cosmic.

But I was built of constellations and undercurrents,

oceans of knowing,

the kind of intuition that feels like déjà vu

in the marrow.

They needed flat.

Linear.

Predictable.

I was not made flat.

I was not made quiet.

I was not made small.

But I learned to pretend I was

because the world made it clear

that being more came with consequences.

So I learned to shrink myself strategically.

To smile before speaking.

To apologize before wanting.

To love quietly, so I wouldn’t scare anyone away.

Which is how I became

the woman who writes paragraphs

to people who respond:

“lol”

“yeah”

“nice.”

It’s how I learned to make myself

easy to leave.

And I tell myself I’m used to it.

I tell myself it doesn’t matter anymore.

I tell myself I don’t need reciprocity.

That I’m self-soothing.

Self-contained.

Self-aware.

But the truth?

There is a bruise

under my sternum

that pulses when I reach.

Not pain

just recognition.

Memory.

Muscle remembering the weight

of being unreceived.

Every time I pick up my phone,

I feel the echo of every time

someone didn’t choose me.

Friends I held through heartbreaks

who vanished once the sun came back.

People who swore I was rare

but never treated me like it.

Lovers who took my depth

and gave me their surface.

People who admired my light

but never protected my flame.

And I tell myself

“You are too much.”

“You overwhelm.”

“You love wrong.”

But then another voice rises

older than the ache,

older than the wound,

older than the shrinking

and she says:

No.

You were never too much.

You were just more than they knew how to hold.

You were cosmic in a world

that only understands convenient.

And I am tired

god, I am tired

of calling my depth a flaw

just because others chose to drown in shallow water.

I pick up my phone.

I put it down.

I breathe.

Not because I’m afraid to love.

Not because I’m unworthy.

Not because I need to change.

But because I finally understand:

I do not need to be chosen

to be real.

Or whole.

Or wanted.

Or extraordinary.

I am the girl with galaxies behind her eyes.

And I refuse to collapse myself

to fit inside someone else’s

small sky.