Collected Verses
Each piece captures a moment, a feeling, or a fragment of thought.
Between Doses
At first, nothing changes.
The days move normally. Thought behaves. The world holds its shape. It feels almost triumphant, like proof that the fear was unnecessary—that whatever once required intervention has resolved itself quietly while no one was watching. The medication lingers in the body like an afterimage, doing its work invisibly.
Then it begins to recede.
Not abruptly. Not dramatically.
The first sign is not panic, but distortion. A faint pressure behind the eyes. A fuzziness where clarity once lived. Vision blurs just enough to make the world feel slightly unreal, as if looking through glass that has not been cleaned properly.
Her body remains present.
Her mind does not.
Focus becomes impossible to anchor. Attention drifts the moment it is grasped. Thoughts arrive unfinished and leave without explanation. She tries to concentrate—to force her awareness into alignment—but it slips away each time, refusing to be commanded.
The effort hurts.
Not in the body, but somewhere deeper. A dull, persistent ache that comes from straining against something that will not respond. The pain of reaching for control and finding none willing to answer. It feels like being locked out of a room she once occupied without question.
The fear grows quietly.
Not as panic, but as uncertainty. The unsettling awareness that her mind is no longer behaving predictably. That thoughts are no longer tools but intrusions—appearing uninvited, dissolving mid-formation, leaving her stranded in the aftermath.
She begins to wonder which version of herself is real.
The one held together by medication?
Or the one unraveling without it?
The question sharpens into something more dangerous. What if the medication was never correcting an imbalance, but masking her true state? What if clarity is not her natural condition, but something granted temporarily—chemically, conditionally?
Dependence becomes its own kind of terror.
The idea that she might need something external to remain herself. That the mind she recognizes—the one capable of focus, of calm, of continuity—might not exist independently anymore. Or worse: might never have existed at all.
But the fear cuts both ways.
Because taking something you might not need feels just as threatening. The possibility that she is altering herself unnecessarily. That she is shaping her inner life around a diagnosis that may no longer apply. That she has been medicated for so long she no longer knows what her unaltered mind feels like—or if she would recognize it if she met it again.
Who is she without it?
Would she feel sharper?
Or louder?
Or unbearable?
She realizes then that the medication has become more than treatment—it has become a boundary. A line separating the known from the unknown. On one side is a self she understands. On the other is a version she has not encountered in years, if ever.
And she is afraid of both.
Afraid of losing herself without it.
Afraid of not knowing who she is with it.
So she exists in the space between doses, between certainty and doubt, between chemistry and identity—wondering whether the mind is something to be trusted, something to be managed, or something that can no longer be left alone.
The most frightening thought is not that she might need the medication.
It is that after all this time, she no longer knows which version of her mind is truly hers—and whether either one can be safely lived in without fear.
The First Decent
It began with the air turning unfamiliar.
The room was unchanged, yet suddenly uninhabitable, as though oxygen had been quietly withdrawn while she wasn’t looking. Each breath arrived incomplete, thin and useless, slipping through her chest without staying. Her lungs worked harder, then harder still, desperate to catch what was no longer there.
The world tilted.
Not all at once—slowly, deliberately—like a painting being lifted from the wall. The floor drifted sideways. The edges of things lost their agreement. Sound stretched and warped, distant and too close at the same time. Her heart struck against her ribs with frantic insistence, an animal trying to escape its cage.
Darkness crept in from the corners of her vision.
At first it was soft, like dusk. Then heavier. Encroaching. The center of the world narrowed to a tunnel that would not hold still. Her hands went numb. Her body no longer felt like something she belonged to.
Gravity claimed her.
The floor rose to meet her, cold and absolute. She folded inward without instruction, limbs drawn tight as if containment might stop the unraveling. Her spine curved protectively around something fragile and vital. She made herself small, smaller than fear, smaller than the room.
The world continued without her.
Her chest burned. Her throat closed. The act of breathing became foreign, mechanical, impossible. Each attempt failed before it could begin. Panic bloomed fully then—not loud, not dramatic—but vast. Total. A certainty that this was the end of the body’s cooperation.
Her thoughts scattered. Language abandoned her.
What remained was need.
It surfaced from somewhere older than memory, raw and unshaped, pulling itself free of her chest and spilling into the dark. A reaching, a calling, directed toward the one place that had ever meant safety. The name lived in her mouth even when nothing else would.
The room spun faster.
Blackness pressed closer, thick and suffocating. Her body shook with effort, with terror, with the unbearable demand to stay alive when the instructions had been lost. She clutched herself as if she might disappear otherwise, as if holding on tightly enough could keep her from falling completely away.
Eventually—though time had ceased to behave—something loosened.
Not peace.
Not relief.
Just enough air to survive.
The world did not apologize when it returned. It simply resumed its place around her, indifferent to what it had taken. She remained on the floor long after, curled into herself, emptied and shaken, aware of a new truth settling quietly into her bones.
That the body can betray you without warning.
That the mind can turn against its own shelter.
That once the floor has caught you like that, it never quite lets you forget the way down.
Inheritance
The house knew before she did.
Something shifted in it—subtle, but unmistakable. The air thickened, as if dust had learned to breathe. Corners darkened. The walls, once indifferent, drew closer, attentive in the way animals become when they sense weather turning.
Then came the noise.
Not a single sound, but many—objects losing their purpose all at once. The violent rearranging of space. Things meant to stay put suddenly airborne, then ruined. Each impact traveled through the floor and into her bones, teaching them what to expect.
She did not run.
Running invited pursuit.
Stillness was safer. Stillness made her small. She folded inward where the hallway narrowed, pressing herself into shadow, counting her breaths so the house would not give her away.
He moved through the rooms like a force the structure could not resist. Doors flung open. Drawers emptied. The past—photographs, keepsakes, harmless things—was punished for remaining within reach. The house gave up piece after piece, learning what it cost to stand in his way.
When he reached her, the air collapsed.
His presence filled the space meant for oxygen. His shape eclipsed the light. What passed between them was not a conversation but a transfer—something taken from him and placed inside her, heavy and permanent. A truth she was too young to understand, but old enough to carry.
It settled deep.
After, the house fell quiet, but it was not relief. It was the silence that follows desecration. The kind that remembers. The kind that waits.
She learned then that fear does not always look like terror. Sometimes it looks like instruction. It teaches you how to listen for danger before it announces itself. How to read rooms the way others read faces. How to leave parts of yourself behind so there is less to be taken.
Years later, she would forget the exact shape of his anger, the order in which things broke.
But the house never forgot.
Even now, in unfamiliar rooms, when something falls or a sound comes too fast, her body answers before her mind does. The walls seem to lean in. The air tightens. The past presses close enough to breathe again.
Some inherit names.
Some inherit homes.
She inherited the moment the house learned how to be afraid.