No Permission

Today, in the warm silence of the shower, a thought found me without asking permission.

And suddenly, the tears came. Not the kind you choose, but the kind that fall on their own and steal the air from your lungs.

How is it possible to live twenty years with someone... twenty years!... learning how to be friends, how to be shelter, how to be a team?

To be a whole woman.

To be a wife.

To help each other cross life.

To raise children side by side.

To invent routines, memories, traditions.

To carry weights invisible to the eyes of the world.

And then, one day, to say only the simplest truth: “I don’t want this anymore.”

And in that instant, to stop being human.

To turn into the demon.

To be called a narcissist.

Selfish.

A destroyer of families.

Unfaithful.

A cheap fuck.

As if twenty years could disappear in a breath.

As if love, loyalty, effort, and sacrifice had never existed.

As if choosing your own life were a crime punish able by words sharp enough to break skin.

How does that happen?

How does a woman go from “everything” to “nothing” simply because she refuses to keep drowning in silence?

And the cruelest part... it isn’t over.

It still hurts.

It hurts in the most unexpected moments: under hot water, when for a brief second everything feels safe, and then comes the memory of everything that was lost the exact moment the truth was spoken.

It hurts because words stay.

They echo.

They slip quietly into moments of stillness and whisper: “What if you really are everything they said you were?”

The pain no longer screams.

It lingers.

It settles in the chest.

It shows up as tears without warning.

I am healing, but healing is not forgetting.

And being strong is not the absence of pain.

It still hurts.

And there are day... like today...

when it hurts deeply.