©ESR 2026

⚠️**Content Advisory** for hints at family trauma and grief of loss. A piece on working through grief.

Door One: To Myself

You didn’t think you’d get this far,

not with your voice intact.

But look…

fingers on keys,

heart raw and rhythmic,

you’re laying bricks in a cathedral made of echoes.

You never asked to be the archivist

of your own pain,

but here you are,

turning drafts into constellations,

blogs into balm.

Fifty-nine beginnings filed under “someday,”

and somehow…

that’s already more than silence ever gave you.

They handed you broken scripts and brittle silences,

told you survival was your greatest act.

But you,

you found another

greater still:

translation.

Pain to poetry.

Anger to architecture.

Loss to light that lives in public.

This wasn’t what you dreamed.

But it’s what you built.

And when it breathes out into the world,

the world will breathe back.

And for the first time,

the echo will be yours.

Door Two: To My Mother

You taught me everything

no child should ever have to learn.

How to flinch before words.

How to hide pain so well

even mirrors couldn’t find it.

How to fear the person

who was supposed to be my first shelter.

You were my harshest critic.

My most unpredictable storm.

My first nightmare.

You told me I was dramatic.

That I was wrong.

That I was dirty.

That I was making it up.

But it was your silence that dirtied me—

not my truth.

When I said he touched me,

you blamed me.

When I said I’d tell someone else,

you hit me.

Your legacy is this:

a mother more loyal to shame

than to her own child’s voice.

I got more warmth from a marble statue

of the Mother Mary

than I ever got from you.

And she never once blinked.

Never once said a word.

But even she didn’t strike me for crying.

You didn’t have to die.

But you did it anyway.

Kept secrets

until the hospital had to call me.

Made me clean up your shame

like I used to clean up my own bleeding knees.

No apology.

No reckoning.

No moment where you finally chose me.

I can’t forgive you.

Not because I won’t.

Because I still wake up

with pieces of you lodged in my throat

like glass.

And it hurts too much to swallow.

Pain was my inheritance.

You,

my first warden.

And yet, I survived.

That,

you did not teach me.

Door Three: The Hollowing

There is a door that does not open,

it unravels.

Not with sound, but with absence

so thick it stains your breath.

No hinges.

No handle.

Only the slow dissolving of direction

until forward, backward, up, and down

become irrelevant

as your limbs forget their names.

You do not fall through this door.

You drift.

Tied to ropes of indecision,

pulled so taut by ghosts of action

you cannot scream,

because scream implies sound

and you are too far from noise now.

There is no light.

No glint, no glare, no star.

Your eyes strain open,

but there is nothing to see.

There is no air,

so there is nothing to taste,

nothing to smell,

no wind to press itself to your skin

and whisper you are here.

There is no touch.

Your fingers reach,

but find no edge,

no anchor,

no proof of existence.

This is not stillness.

Stillness has purpose.

This is suspension—

limbs limp in a gravity-less abyss,

no ground, no sky,

only the constant, gnawing ache

of being unmoored

with all the desire to act

and no direction to act toward.

It is a room of fog.

But not the kind that brushes skin…

the kind that erases it.

You reach out and meet no air.

You inhale and swallow nothing.

You try to think, and your thoughts

echo into themselves

like screams shouted down a well

that forgot how to reply.

Behind this door is

The Hollowing.

A place where no one tells you no,

but no one remembers your name either.

And still, you float.

Not broken.

Not whole.

Just

waiting.