The house felt dead.
The future had fucked off.
A decade of love reduced to boxes,
quiet rooms
and one final door being shut.
I stood there carrying all of it,
like someone had filled my chest with stone,
knowing the next bit of road was mine
and I’d be walking it alone.
But the breakup wasn’t the real beginning.
It just pulled the pin.
For thirty years that frightened kid
had sat somewhere behind my grin,
swallowing secrets, shame and fear,
keeping every bastard word within.
I built a man around him.
Strong back. Hard face. Never complain.
But pressure doesn’t disappear,
it just learns where to hide the pain.
Then came a stalker’s click,
some twisted little gift.
They thought they’d knock me further down.
Instead,
they gave the lid a lift.
I didn’t gently open that box.
I smashed the fucking locks.
Dragged every truth into the room
and let it speak for what was lost.
I vomited thirty years of screams,
old fear, old rage, old tears.
Sent words back to the people
who had lived untouched for years.
No more silence.
No more oath.
No more protecting them both.
I became the judge and jury
because nobody judged them then.
The quiet lad turned radioactive
and found his voice again.
That trigger ripped the mask clean off.
The man I’d built just fell.
It broke a twenty five year trance
and woke the child from hell.
Then AuDHD came marching in,
loud as fuck and twice as fast.
A dial up scream, a hundred alarms,
every memory from the past.
Grief fed trauma.
Trauma fed thought.
My head became a spinning crowd.
Why can’t I have a normal brain?
I actually said that out loud.
But normal never saved me.
Masking nearly made me disappear.
I’d spent my life performing calm
while living underneath the fear.
Pandora’s box was open now.
No chance of forcing it back shut.
CPTSD finally had a name
for why I’d always felt so fucked.
I turned forty, not celebrating,
more accepting what was true.
That the life I thought I understood
was one I’d never properly knew.
The hardest men break hardest.
I know that much first hand.
One minute built like concrete,
next you can barely fucking stand.
But cracks let honesty get through.
Not hope wrapped up in pretty spin.
Just enough room for the bloke I buried
to finally start climbing in.
So let my restless legs keep moving.
Let the stimming have its chance.
Let the quirks I hid for decades
stop apologising when they dance.
The mufflers are off.
The noise is here.
Some days it still feels insane.
But I’m learning how to live inside
this weirdly wired brain.
I won’t crawl back behind that mask
to make the world comfortable again.
I spent thirty years pretending.
They don’t get another day.