Girls, Interrupted

Two voices. Still here.

{imi}

When the calendar marked October 24th,
a light fractured through the blinds,
turning stardust into constellations.

I didn’t cry the first time
as the air trembled,
filling my lungs with oxygen.

The room distorted
as I stared at a white fluorescent glow.

Skinny trees laid down their clothing
while shadows kept whispering,
my curse that could no longer be undone.

Every silence hummed
like something sentient,
crowning the arrival of my beginning,
extending an invitation for sorrow
to my father’s hopes of having a son.

Every night started glowing
under the same full moon,
eternally white,
radiating a brightness
forced to distribute itself equally,
just like my tiny fingers
that grew tired from playing the piano
until I finally found the courage to say,

“Father, can we please take a break?”

In time, I became a morning person,
waking up an hour early
to practice the piano alone.
My fingers wouldn’t touch the keys,
floating above them from a distance.

I mustn’t make any noise
to avoid crying later,
while my father shook his head
from left to right,
and right to left,
signalling the mistakes
in notes marked as deficiencies,
while my soul kept humming
the same tune within.

When I gathered the courage to tell him
I was quitting the piano,
I was met with hours of preaching
about the waste I had caused him
through the time and investments he put in.

I became a sunk cost,
as my words never truly reached him.
My wish turned into prophecy
as I silenced myself
by learning not to make noise.

His money couldn’t stitch
the hole in my heart,
taking the shape of longing,
turning the softness
of a blood-orange horizon
into darkness,
breathing slowly,
wrapping itself around my spring.

A soft endurance.
A sterile mercy.
A room breathing
neither warmth
nor the cold that made me shiver
more than the darkest storms.

On the longest night,
my soul whispered,
and the ground answered
by roaring with thunder.
There was only fog
when I was forced to meet death.

As we walked toward a graveyard,
I stumbled over a rock
to avoid seeing
what lay ahead.

I was only seven
when death could have weight,
but not a little girl
carrying heartbreak
from a love carved out of devotion,
a love that made every other man
feel like an echo
from the first day she began to live,
held by the comfort of his steady hand
and the haunting of a wound
he never meant to give.

A hunger for excellence
wrapped itself around me,
turning my life into a discipline
I was forced to live within.

Death met me
in every corner,
in every shade,
while I kept demanding life
to unfold as a quest for validation.

My reflection
began resembling someone else,
melting like a snowflake
falling in the wrong season,
changing shape,
turning into liquid,
marking the beginning of my end.

{Laura B}

As a child
I didn't have imaginary friends
I had imagined endings.
The quiet idea
that I wouldn't last.
Because even as a child
Death already knew my name.

I’ve always known
that escape was a concept
worth memorizing.
I filed it away next to breathing,
next to flinching,
next to bracing for impact.

I learned early
how to flirt with death.
I felt its breath around my neck
whispering its spell
with recklessness.
With substances.
With nights that bled into mornings
I never wanted to greet.

I used to live
like the night owed me oblivion,
like if I stayed out long enough
if I drank fast enough,
swallowed whatever
would soften the sharp corners
long enough
for me to forget
how badly I wanted out of it,
the dark would eventually
collect its debt
and I could stop the chase.

I stood on edges
with poison in my veins,
leaned into gravity
like I was tired of negotiating.

{imi}

My breaths turned into vigilance for survival
under the heat of my sister’s temper.
I lived under one roof,
yet never on equal ground.

I always felt as though
I should never have arrived.
Neither my body
nor my soul was welcomed.

My sisters were skinny.
I was not.
They kept mocking me.
My older sister even wrote a song
about how fat I was.

I learned what it meant
to make myself lighter
so no one would notice
how much space I took.

Shame waited for me
at the dining table,
each gaze measuring
the minutes of my absence.

Moving away for college freed me,
until shadows crawled
up my sister’s neck,
pulling her closer.
It was all fun and games
until it wasn’t.

Her substance addiction
was a ruin I refused to measure.

I felt ashamed
of bringing her
to my bachelor’s graduation.
When she arrived with a flower bouquet,
I forced myself to smile.

I stopped calling her family
the day I heard she slapped our mother.
Yet I feared the gaze
that could someday wait for me
in every mirror,
the kind that hunted for escape,
dilated with hunger
rather than wonder.

My cherished memories
became mental prisons,
and I carried the weight of my history
when my legs could no longer
carry me forward.

The only kind of future
that promised me a rescue
was the pause between breaths,
keeping time better than any clock,
whispering like relief,
promising rest it cannot explain,
the kind of silence
that follows too much noise.

Death didn’t arrive.
It was already there.

More consistent
than the love
that missed me.

{Laura B}

I chased annihilation
through strangers’ apartments,
through bathroom mirrors
that stopped recognizing me,
through laughter that sounded hollow
even as it spilled from my lips.

I wasn’t trying to feel good.
I was trying to feel gone.
Living like someone
who didn't plan to stay long.

Every swallow,
every line,
every pill
was a quiet plea:
please, let it be enough to take me.

Some may call it self-destruction.
I called it making-a-fucking-wish.

Why drag out a life
I didn't plan to keep?

I treated my body
like a temporary address
someplace to crash,
never to decorate.

Left it unlocked.
Left it alone with strangers.
Let danger sit beside me
without asking its name.

Sometimes it followed me home.
Sometimes I followed it.
Moving too fast through streets
that didn’t forgive mistakes,
every rush a quiet prayer
murmured under my breath:
If this is it, death, please don’t hesitate.

Death was a bitch about it.
It stalked and shouted.
It leaned in doorways,
watched from across rooms,
patient and smirking,
knowing how bad I craved it
and never giving in.

I was trapped
in a life that felt
like a locked room
with no windows
and no witnesses
and the certainty
absolute,
bone-deep
that nothing and no one
was coming to save me.

{imi}

Only ashes remained of the little girl
who looked deeply into her father’s eyes,
close enough to realize
that each sunrise she woke to
had always been her dawn.

When I lost her,
my days began missing their sun.

She never returned to me,
her black hair folding into curls,
her gaze missing its curiosity,
like an owl losing its sight at night.

My life grew like a leaf,
drifting away from the tree that gave it life.
The beginning was never tender,
nor the storm that began
to dim my light.

My sleep turned into nightmares,
returning old dreams,
as compost of dead leaves
began bursting in my chest,
almost like thunder.

A winding course came through differing depths
when I realized no luminous light
awaited around the corner.

{Laura B}

A time when hope
collapsed so completely
that death stopped
being something
my actions asked for
and started looking like a door
instead of a wall.

So one night,
I stopped flirting.
I stopped chasing.

I stopped banging my fists on the wall
and walked through the door instead.
If you want a job done right
after all
best do it yourself.

No neon humming.
No music seeping through walls.
No liquid courage in my blood.
Just the driver's seat of my car,
sleeping pills,
and the sudden, uncanny silence
of a body powering down.

And next to me
there was death
no more smirk
no, it was even worse than that.
Fucking pity.
Don't pity me, bitch, I thought,
I had to do your fucking job.

Lights out.

{imi}

Stars pledged to remember what I lost,
while my death and my potential
trembled in the same hand.

I opened the doors
to the pain I never dared to touch,
the screams I never shouted,
the past I never truly accepted,
the fears and wounds it left.

They turned into a rupture,
crushing my soul,
stained by a contradiction
where beginnings always felt like endings,
yet endings never felt like beginnings,
and I remained unchosen,
untouched by the understanding of another.

The same recurring sentences
appeared between my breaths:

I’m exhausted.
I’m human.
I’m human too.

A crying storm broke out
among the memories.
I’d grown too tired to carry on.

Please stop.

But it didn’t.

I didn’t deserve this.
I’m so tired.
I’m human too.

My small, wounded fragments
waited to be felt,
to be accepted.
I was tired of being good,
of erasing myself for too long.

My life became a stage,
an act played for too long,
as though I could be indifferent,
daring to believe
that silence could voice my longing,
that the beauty of simplicity
could hold the depths of my soul,
that longing to be understood
might dim my light just enough to feel,
standing beneath the breath of my chaos
until I no longer felt anything.

{Laura B}

Seven minutes.
The world continued without me:
cars passing, lights changing,
people laughing in the distance
as if nothing had shifted at all.
My death was insignificant.

I wasn’t dreaming.
I wasn’t floating.
I was just
gone.

Like a room after the tenant leaves,
the door clicking shut on an empty space.

And then
pulled back
into a body
I no longer wanted to inhabit.

I was furious.

At the living.
At the saving.
At the fact that breath
was returned to me
without consent.

Throat on fire.
Sound arrived all at once,
too loud,
too close.
Doctors with the audacity
to put me back into myself
like I’d wandered too far from shore
and they decided
I wasn’t allowed to drown.

I woke angry enough
to bite through wires.
And I would have
if it wasn't for the endotracheal tube
shoved down my throat.

Angry at the friend
who refused to look away
when she found me
dying in my car.
Like I should be grateful
for the pure luck
she was even there.

At the doctors
who called it a success
that they saved my life
as if I asked them to.

But most of all
most of fucking all
angry at myself
for surviving
without consulting me.

I didn’t feel saved.

I felt overruled.

For a while after,
I still lived
like someone
waiting for a better exit.

Let rage justify the damage.
Let numbness pose as peace.
Let survival feel like a sentence
instead of a gift.

Even the word
survivor
used to make my skin crawl.

What did it even mean?

It looked like
brushing my teeth
and resenting the mirror.
Or more accurately,
the reflection staring back at me.

Counting pills
that were no longer an option.

Swallowing water
that tasted like obligation.

Getting dressed
for a life I hadn’t agreed to.

Feeling my pulse
like it was a clerical error
someone forgot to correct.

I didn’t fall in love with life.
I circled it warily.
I stayed alive out of spite
at first,
then out of curiosity.

I didn’t heal.
I unlearned.

Unlearned the belief
that my absence
would be better
than my existence.

Unlearned the habit
of punishing myself
just for being.

And then one day,
I laughed,
and it didn’t sound borrowed.
It didn't sound hollow.

Wonder slipped in sideways.
A moment of beauty
I didn’t rush past,
a place I wanted to see again,
a reason to stay
five minutes longer
than I’d planned.

That was when I realized
wanting to live
is the most dangerous thing of all.

Because Death still calls.

She doesn’t knock.
She never fucking knocks.
Just appears
mid-thought, mid-sentence,
mid-I was actually okay for a second
like a hand on the back of my neck.

What if you stopped?

It’s my mind pulling a fire alarm
in an empty building
over
and over
and over
because there were times
there really was a fire.

Death knows my tired hours.
She waits for cracks
in long weeks and quiet nights.
Knows exactly where I’m shattered.

But now I know the difference
between wanting to die
and wanting the pain
to just be fucking quiet.

I still have the thoughts.
I just don’t
follow their breadcrumbs.

imi

Until a whisper reached me
pleading to be heard,
echoing softly from a distance:

“The light never left. It waited for your return.

You are not tired of living.
It’s the weight of being yourself
that has worn you thin.
That quiet pressure to always rise,
to keep standing tall
while your spirit cries.
Give yourself permission.
The choice is yours to release.

The freedom to be anything,
to do anything,
to be with oneself completely.

To hold countless possibilities,
a love that needs no searching.”

Flames consumed me completely,
stripping away every colour,
every note
of the life I knew.

From the heap of ash,
a flicker stirred.
A fragile shimmer
turned into breath.

Death didn’t walk into sunlight
to have its encounter with me.
It invited me into its shadows,
forcing me to shed a layer of skin.

I rose not as who I was,
but as something reborn,
lighter,
fiercer,
and destined for skies
it could never reach before.

{Laura B.}

Instead, I build.
A life with movement.
With laughter
loud enough to tether me here.
With purpose
that earns the effort of staying.

I chased Death
because I didn’t believe
life could hold me gently.

I am learning
how to stay.
Learning
to hold myself
gently.

I am not cured.
I am choosing.

Choosing to live.
Choosing to speak.
Choosing to
turn my story outward
so someone else
standing on an edge
might see another path
through the fog.

{imi & Laura}

We didn’t choose life because it was beautiful.
We chose it because it was still ours.
We chose it because after everything
that tried to erase us,
staying became an act of authorship.

It didn’t ask us to carve a life
from the rubble of a battlefield.
It asked us to choose ourselves
when no one else did.

Not as a farewell to who we were,
but as a recognition of what we outgrew.

What remained was not innocence,
not healing,
not a version of us scrubbed clean of history.

What remained was presence:
deliberate,
unborrowed,
a staying that did not ask permission or forgiveness.

Our stories are different,
yet the ache that brought our voices together
spoke the same language.

Our prophecies were hidden in fog,
disguised as compliance.

Awakening did not arrive
until we found the courage
to ask the right questions.

The right questions didn’t arrive as revelations.
They arrived as friction.
Pauses we could no longer outrun.

And once spoken,
they changed the terms of living.
Not into something easier,
but into something honest.

That honesty took courage,
the kind that asked us to witness the breaking
of everything we had spent our lives building,
until we let our fears
become the shape of the paths we walked.

And we keep going.
Not because it is safe,
but because stopping
is no longer an option we believe in.

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Authors note:

These pages hold breath, memory, and truth that costs something to say. We bled here not for effect, but because this was the only way the story could exist without erasing us. A great amount of effort went into shaping it, holding the emotion it carried and for the audio.

If our work moved you and you feel called to support what we are building here, we would truly appreciate you considering going paid. Pieces like this take a lot from us, even though they give back through connection and resonance. Your support is what keeps this space alive and allows me to keep creating the work I care about.

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for meeting us in the places that are often hard to share.

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