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no title can express my sorrow

there's no standard treatment for a broken heart. i sigh quietly to myself, thinking i’ll actually find an answer on how to heal a broken heart on google it all began five years ago, when i finally started spending time with him—the boy who seemed to shine a little brighter than the rest. he was the kindest, the prettiest, the one who made my heart feel lighter just by existing. and he wanted to be my friend. how could i not fall? kept the friendship up for a couple of years and my crush for him grew even stronger. sometimes he would come up in my dreams and then i would try to summon fate itself—manifesting, wishing, aching for him to love me back. because, as every girl knows, there is always a phase where we believe the universe listens. and so, i rinsed and repeated, hoping one day, he would look at me the way I looked at him when we messaged or meet up, he felt like my twin flame. a connection so deep, so natural, that i convinced myself he must feel it too. he understood me, and i understood him but i never felt that he liked me as much as i liked him. and then, it ended—not with a dramatic farewell, not with a grand confession, but with silence. I ruined it in my own quiet way: fading out, withdrawing, blocking him, letting the messages go unanswered. I stopped reaching out, and so did he. it was as if we had been a story left unfinished, pages ripped from the book before the final chapter could be written it has been four months since we last spoke. and now, he has a girlfriend. may I add—throughout our years of friendship, he never had one. situationships, yes, but never something real. yet, here she is. not me. the day I found out, it struck me in a way I hadn’t expected. I had let him slip from my thoughts, let weeks pass without missing him—until I saw what I had once longed for, in the hands of someone else. I hadn’t realized I was still holding onto the dream until it shattered before me. now, my mind drifts to what could have been. I picture myself in her place, feel the ghost of a life that was never mine. would he have loved me, if I had held on? if I had tried? was I ever good enough for him? wasn’t I pretty enough for him…? why… her… not… me…? time is meant to heal. i know this. but this wound runs deep. losing someone you once felt connected to in the deepest corners of your soul is a quiet kind of grief, the kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly but lingers in the spaces between thoughts. my heart feels heavy, my soul even heavier but today, i miss him more than usually. i’ve fallen to deep, so now every time i think of him, i will miss him deeply.

@lukrecija

Feb 28, 2025

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A crispy Realization

For someone who claims to identify so closely with solitude, uncovering just how tethered I was to the emotions of people I love was a crispy realization. Of course, that attachment is the basis for any kind of relationship. You cannot claim to “have someone” in your life if you do not feel some kind of emotional connection towards them. The stronger the connection, the stronger the relationship. We all know this. However, there is something to be said about a relationship that is “too good”; a bond so strong due to its shocking lack of tension. In hindsight of various broken and fragmented connections I’ve been apart of, any relationship that exists while remaining entirely unscathed now kind of terrifies me. I believe there can be such a thing as “too much love”, and I think those who have given or received it know when they have done so. It’s a mistake anyone is capable of making. Imagine a relationship so polished, free from any erosion (visible or otherwise); seemingly perfect. This type of connection can only be established through a building of trust and an abundance of time. However, I’ve come to learn that the more impeccable bonds tend to break easy when faced with their first real blow. Birds only crash into the cleanest of glass. *"If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it...*" I don’t want excess. For the food of love, I am no glutton. I eat until I am full and push my plate aside. I used to love like my life depended on it. I put those people whom I adored on the highest of pedestals, framed them in my gallery and admired new details every time we shared a visit. Maybe I just hadn’t been wronged enough to ever think that I could be wounded by those I dote on so heavily. What is it with loving and being loved that makes feeling hurt seem so impossible? Why must love shatter all preconceived expectations of what emotion is? Is love really so massive, so gargantuan that it conquers all other feeling? Yes, and no. At least that’s what I think. This is all just what I think. I don’t want to come across as some great romantic or lovesick puppy or old friend. I’m just trying to figure out the right way to love, like everyone else.

@ben10

Mar 16, 2025

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date idea

The sharp scent of rain tumbles clumsily in as you tease window-hinges wider with the pads of your fingers. A siren trails close behind, uninvited, sears your eardrums, dies off down the block. Your neighbors are arguing again. Laundry, loans, lack of commitment… like yesterday, like the day before. You think it would be suffocating to wrap yourself up in someone else’s sheets.  It’s five o’clock. Leaning against the sill and flicking the radio dial with one recently manicured nail, you tune into the local news. Roaring wall of static, then calm conversation between two anchors bubbling up through an old set of Panasonic loudspeakers. You are feeling incomplete today, like yesterday, like the day before. Rigatoni boils in the kitchen. You check the leftmost cabinet and find strawberry jam, unopened. You check the cupboard and look over a tub of tahini, a collection of canned soup, and a stack of pie tins. You check the counter, behind the cutlery. Finally, you check the fridge, ducking down to see only your own brown-eyed reflection in one last — now empty — jar of Prego. Your shoulders dip. You slip on white sneakers, not-so-white-as-they-once-were. Why did you try to paint the front door? It is peeling now, ugly like a fledgling losing young feathers. Flecks of buttery yellow dapple paisley carpeting. The great outdoors wait for you at the bottom of a cramped stairwell with twin light fixtures, both broken. A sky like an old sweater is draped above Brooklyn, ready to wring itself out again at any moment. Once around the block, rubber soles brushing damp cement, you walk briskly. At first you fling yourself against the humidity, then become self-conscious and adopt a slower pace as you near the corner store. Two dollars, sixty cents. Like last week, like the week before.  You and I, we are looking down at our phones and stumble into each other, halfway home. It is no one’s fault. You recognize me from somewhere, you say, and feel like a bad person for lying. You have never seen me before in your life. I ask for your number. That night you eat too quickly, knowing you’ll wish you’d saved some leftovers. I come over once, then again. We go out for dinner at tacky restaurants, where art deco posters from the nineteen-thirties have pinned themselves up in scattered flocks across worn-out drywall and the menu is printed with strange font on laminated placemats. The appetizer sample photos are unnerving; the bruschetta cowers like a scared animal awash in excessive camera flash. I make a joke about it, and you laugh. We order dishes to share. The food is always better than I expected, but not quite as good as you wanted it to be. You don’t mind. We talk for hours. We agree, ballpoint pens are better. I hold you, and the ten p.m. bus pulls you out of my arms and through the dusky streets, past crowds and utility poles. I hold you, and we rhyme our steps. Burgundy is around us in the leaves and in the dirt. You wear a coat I gave you. I hold you, and we swat flies out on your porch. The days are getting shorter. I hold you, and we watch blu-ray CDs you found on sale. Soft light from the flatscreen plays across your face as you fall asleep. I keep the movie on a little longer. I hold you. In December, we bring a blanket to Long Island and listen to the sound of snow falling on the dunes. You call in sick for work too often. I hold you, and you know my callouses well. We share the same sheets; we are wrapped up in each other. I hold you, and kiss your hair. You smell like candied oranges. The afternoons eat away at one another. Dishes pile like uneven layer-cakes in your kitchen sink, crested with suds. You say you feel uninspired. Now we argue about laundry, and the sounds of your unhappy apartment are heard through half-open windows.  You shout, eyebrows furrowed like the pages of a book. A white plate soars from the grip of a trembling hand, misses an upturned chin, and interrupts us with its shattering. This time, it’s different. Sleep escapes us ‘til the sun is already planted on the easternmost rooftop. I hurt you the way I learned to, and stay awhile, but don’t know why I stay. We sink into sweet, heavy things: the saxophone in “Charcoal Baby”, shared creamsicles on hot Saturday evenings. I see you less and less, and remember less and less of you. Will I see you next week? Yes, if you text me. You forget, just like we’d both hoped.

@ad

Sep 17, 2024

Top Recs from @baileyxward

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JACKET

I hang your jackets in my closet like trophies, or maybe like warnings. I don’t know which. I don’t wear them. It’s far too hot — sticky, oppressive heat that clings to the skin like regret — but I keep them there, row by row, like memory has a dress code. The scent is gone now. That clean, clove-sweet sharpness you always carried. Still, I walk past them every day. I make myself look. It’s supposed to mean something. All of this. I keep telling myself I’m meant for something bigger — to make a name for myself, they always say — but what name? The one I was given, or the one I’ll have to carve out with blood and trembling hands? Fifty-five years. Fifty-five steps to the top of the hill, up to that damn library where I’ve been meaning to go. Where I keep meaning to go. And yet. I don’t move. My legs work. I know they do. They carried me through worse things — war zones of the heart, ancestral curses, kitchens full of shattered plates. But I still can’t make them climb. I don’t know if that makes me weak or merciful. I don’t know if it’s sabotage or a mercy I don’t deserve. A dog that weeps after it kills is still a killer. A dog that weeps is still a dog. Your guilt won’t make you holy. Your regret won’t make you clean. So I ask: when you see a butterfly land on lavender — that momentary grace, delicate and impossible — do you still spell my name in your head, as if that might bring me back? As if I ever left?

@baileyxward

May 28, 2025

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ROOM

My room is a corridor of doorways. Not a space, not a shelter, but a network of half-thoughts and abandoned exits. The floors reek of piss, like some wild dog marked its territory and then left me to rot in it. The walls pulse with memory. Or maybe delusion. Either way, it’s loud in here. Thoughts swarm like ants — frantic, mindless, pathetic — all scrabbling for something to hold on to. Information. Meaning. But there’s nothing. Just famine. Starvation of sense. A thousand tiny legs searching for crumbs in a house that hasn’t been fed in years. And every day the sky breaks open again. Not metaphorically. The rain here isn’t poetic. It hammers. It devours. It doesn’t cleanse; it drowns. The ants drown, but they don’t die. They keep moving, twitching, twitching, twitching. Not alive. Not dead. Just full of guts and nerves and the viscera that keep them twitching. That hard carapace we all grow when the storm doesn’t stop. That’s all they are. That’s all I am. Sometimes I think I’ll dig my way in. Crawl through the iris of my own eye — molecular, meticulous — and enter the network of my brain like a savior. A surgeon. Maybe a god. Maybe I’ll find the ants and teach them how to be more than twitching muscle and damp despair. Maybe I’ll name them. Maybe I’ll give them something like hope. But dry drowning is real. No matter what they say. And the terrifying thing is — there’s no evidence it isn’t.

@baileyxward

May 27, 2025

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DREAM

Last night, I dreamed—though I can’t tell you what of, not exactly. There were fragments. A lawn, half-mown, or cats—dozens of them, maybe. Their shapes flicker now at the edge of memory, insubstantial. That’s how it always goes. I dream every night, I know this, but each one slips through my fingers by morning, evaporating like steam before I can grasp it. It wasn’t always this way. As a child, I kept a dream journal. Religious about it. Woke up, wrote it down. And something about that changed me. Sharpened the recall, made dreams more solid. Realer. And then, over time, something turned. Now they vanish even faster. Like the act of remembering too hard wore out the muscle. I’ve thought about starting again. Journaling. Documenting. Not just the dreams, but the moments around them—the texture of waking, the taste of forgetting. Because vivid dreams begin with remembering, don’t they? But I hate recollection. The way it drags old feelings back up, stale and bitter. The way it stains the present with shadows of things that never happened. There’s something foul in remembering too much. Still. Maybe I’ll try.

@baileyxward

1d ago