There are homes where reality does not stay in one shape for long.

Where love exists, but so does unpredictability.

Where YOU ARE present, and yet unreachable in ways no child or adult has language for.

So much of what others called “normal” was actually careful management.

Growing up around your mental illness meant learning early that stability is not a given. it is a brief arrangement that shiftS without warning.

There were days when the world behind your eyes felt rearranged, as if you had stepped into a place the rest of us could not follow.

i LEARNED FROM YOU:

To listen for tone before meaning.
To read rooms before words.
To become fluent in what was unspoken.

i learned to adapt to the storm of your mind and run when i could no longer predict the weather. i wore my socially acceptable mask. a mask depicting who you were not.

most Families learn the art of appearing intact, BUT not you. From the outside, things rarely even appeared as such.

when the truth is too complicated, too stigmatized, too easily misunderstood and far too enabled FOR ME TO help you, what is the best solution?

I chose abandonment. for me. for you. for us.

yOU TAUGHT ME TO minimizE disruption by ignoring and silencing the possibility of EMBARRASSMENT AND SHAME. absorbing confusion quietly. At protecting the shape of the household even when its center was unstable.

There is grief in loving someone whose reality is NEVER reachable. I tried. there is grace in that.

and Not because love is absent, but because access was inconsistent. tainted. wronged. enabled in an obscure way.

It is the small, undeniable moments of clarity: laughter that felt real, gestures of care that cut through everything else, fragments of YOU that were unmistakably human, even when your illness was overpowering.

What remains complicated is that nothing fits neatly into blame.

Not YOU.
Not ME.

silence has its own inheritance.

And because some stories are not about ruin at all, but about living inside something that never had a stable shape, and still finding a way to speak from it.

my body was giving up. i needed to go for my hope to live a life of virtue. to heal

knowing i will never see you again brings me a sense of peace and gratitude. YOU DID THE BEST YOU COULD.

I DID THE BEST I COULD.

i am thankful.

AND i will always love you the best way I KNOW HOW.

from afar.