Poet Rae

Maybe it’s not in the noise, not in the endless explanations or the desperate need to be understood. Maybe the answers we keep chasing don’t come in words at all.

So we step back. We let the silence settle, even when it feels heavy. Even when it echoes with everything we’re afraid to face.

And somewhere in that quiet, we begin to hear what we’ve been drowning out—the truth, the clarity, the parts of us we forgot to listen to.

Maybe through silence, we don’t just find answers.

Maybe we find ourselves again.

Poet Rae

I didn’t realize when it started,
how loving you slowly became drowning.
Not loud, not sudden…
but quiet, steady,
like waves pulling me further from shore
while I kept telling myself I could still breathe.

I made myself smaller
so I could fit inside your world.
Adjusted, bent, erased little pieces of me
until I no longer recognized
the person staring back.

And now here we are—
on this break.

Not just from each other,
but from the versions of ourselves
we lost trying to hold on.

Maybe this is what we needed,
not distance to forget,
but space to remember.
Who we were
before love became something that consumed us.

Because I don’t want a love
where I disappear.
And maybe you don’t either.

So here we are,
learning how to stand on our own again…
hoping that in finding ourselves,
we don’t lose everything else.

—or maybe,
for the first time,
we finally find what was real.

Poet Rae

C'est la vie

i got really good at hiding it.

no one saw the quiet shift in me... the way my laughter became lighter, the way my replies got shorter, the way i started choosing silence over explaining what hurt. i still showed up, still did what i had to do, still smiled when it was expected. from the outside, nothing changed.

but inside, everything did.

the things i used to love felt distant. the energy i once had slowly slipped away. and i learned how to carry it all without making a sound—how to keep going even when i felt like stopping.

people call it strength, but it’s really just survival. it’s what happens when you get used to dealing with things on your own.

i’m not asking for anyone to fix me. i just wish someone noticed… before i became this quiet version of myself.

Poet Rae