The mirror will always show you your own truth. It don’t ease it in neither. It just lays it on you like a sack of feed dropped from too high.

When that truth finally landed, it hurt so bad I swore it was his hand again, popping my jaw, rattling my teeth in my skull. Turns out raw truth stings just like a slap when you’ve been trained to flinch.

I learned that the worst breaking ain’t when somebody leaves you. It’s when you start losing pieces of yourself and don’t even feel the tearing no more. Folks say when you finally realize you’ve been headed the wrong way, all you gotta do is turn around and follow the pieces back home.

That’s the lie they tell.

They don’t say a word about what you’re supposed to do when you turn around and there ain’t nothing left to follow. No crumbs. No shine. Just bare ground where you once stood.

That’s when you learn the hardest thing of all — sometimes you don’t get to find yourself.

Sometimes you have to build her again out of dirt, bone, and whatever stubborn breath you’ve got left in your chest. And You don’t just have to survive the beating. That's the easy part.

You got to make it out of the silence.

That dead-water stillness where the air don’t move and your skin starts crawling for no reason. You find yourself standing on the edge of it, realizing you’ve wandered into that place where minds and souls get eaten clean — leaving nothing but a walking shell.

That’s how folks end up wandering parking lots and grocery aisles looking for something they can’t name. People call them crazy, not knowing they’re just searching for pieces that ain’t coming back.

That hollow — that echo-torture after the punishment — that’s the real cruelty. Not the slap. Not the shove. It’s the quiet that comes after, heavy as swamp fog, settling in your chest till you can’t tell your own thoughts from the dark.

He knew that.

That’s why he did it.

The way he’d go unmoved after breaking you, eyes flat, like you were a stranger he never owed a thing. No sorrow. No anger. Not even regret. Just looking at you like you never mattered. Rage, at least, has heat in it. Rage still sees you.

But this — this was colder.

Then he’d drop it all into silence.

Hours.

Days.

No reply.

And every unanswered moment took another piece of me with it, quiet as rot in the roots.

-Marikay