Do you remember who you were
before the world told you who to be?

Before the likes, before the filters,
before your worth depended on
who saw you,
who didn’t,
who cared enough to click twice?
  
I don’t.

Somewhere between
the perfect angles
and curated smiles,
I lost her.
The girl who laughed loud,
cried hard,
spoke her mind without
editing it three times.

Now I take my daily dose—
scroll, compare, refresh, repeat.
A flicker of validation
like a sugar rush to the soul.
Gone in seconds.
And I call it happiness.

But it’s not.

It’s a silence.
A soft forgetting.
Of what it felt like
to just exist
without an audience.

I miss me.
Not the version they love.
The real one.
The messy, too-much,
not-enough one.

The one I buried
beneath all these
happy pills.

Your goodbye didn’t come in words.
It came in colors-
Soft at first,then cruel.
Like a crayon box left in the sun,
Melted,twisted,
Still pretending to be whole.

There was a bleeding red in the way you first loved me-
Too much,too fast,
The kind of color that stains your fingers
Long after the page is gone.
I thought I was your favorite,
The one you'd never let dull.
But love can look a lot like fire
When you don't know it's burning you.

You drifted into quiet blue,
A shade that never speaks but always lingers.
It was the kind of sadness
You don't notice until the room feels colder.
Until your name stops sounding like home,
And starts echoing like distance.

I clung to your flickering yellow,
The last of your laughter,
The fake smiles you wore like stickers-
Easy to peel.
Never meant to stay on
But your warmth was borrowed,
And you gave it back before I was ready.

There was hope,once-
A trembling green we drew together,
When we still believed in growing things.
But even gardens wilt without hands to tend them.
And you let go so slowly
That I didn’t realize I was the only one still holding on.

Your silence came next-
Not cold,not loud-just...black.
The kind that seeps into the cracks,
That waits until you're alone to settle in your chest.
You didn't say goodbye.
You just stopped coloring with me.
And somehow, that hurt even more.

Now I sit with with this crayon box
That still smells like childhood and endings.
Picking through pieces you left behind.
The wrappers are torn,the tips all worn-
But I can't throw them away,
They remember you too well.

And maybe the worst part
Is I still sit with that crayon box in my lap,
Picking out the broken pieces,
Trying to draw you into a picture
That never finishes the same way.

Because even now,
With fingers stained and a heart worn thin,
I keep choosing the same colors-
The ones I loved the most,
The ones that hurt the deepest-
And I still press them to the page,
Knowing they'll break again.
But I color anyway.
Because that's how you taught me to say goodbye.