This is not a sequel to Fractured Love, but rather a side-story going alongside it. Reading the other story is not required.
I used to believe that if I could just learn the rules, everything would stop slipping through my hands.
When we were still three on the couch, my father’s knee pressed into mine, my mother’s fingers moving slowly through my hair, I thought the world was confusing but manageable. Love was a fixed point. It had weight and temperature. I could orbit it and be safe.
At school, the orbit broke.
The other children moved like a flock of birds, turning together without speaking. They understood currents I could not see. One day they would let me trail behind them across the playground gravel, close enough to pretend I belonged. The next, they would scatter the moment I approached, laughter bursting out of them like a door slamming in my face.
I studied them the way I studied books. I noted how long they held eye contact, brief, but not too brief. I watched how they tilted their heads when they were joking. I practiced smiling in the mirror, trying to soften it, to round the edges so it would not look pasted on.
They took my glasses once. Held them above my head, laughing while I jumped for them. When they threw them on the floor and stepped on it, snapping one of the arms in half, they laughed harder, because I did not laugh. I never laughed at the right time.
That, more than anything, seemed to offend them.
I learned to read before most of them. Words made sense. Letters followed rules. Sentences could be diagrammed, understood, dismantled and rebuilt. I wrote stories in careful loops, pouring my imagination on paper, creating worlds and characters.
None of it translated to the playground.
Recess was the worst. The noise did not feel like sound, it felt like impact. High-pitched shrieks ricocheted inside my skull. Whistles pierced through me like needles. The scrape of rubber soles against concrete set my teeth on edge until I wanted to tear my jaw open just to make it stop.
The fluorescent lights in the classroom hummed constantly, a thin electric whine that no one else seemed to hear. They flickered in a rhythm that made my stomach twist. I would stare at the teacher’s mouth instead of the lights, focusing on the shape of her words.
No one else flinched. I did not understand.
I scribbled on the back of my hand because the movement anchored me inside my body and mind. It helped me concentrate. It was the only way to filter the chaos into something survivable. Then I moved on to doodling on free paper or in the margins of my textbooks after one too many rebuke from adults.
The teacher told me to sit still. To stop fidgeting. To pay attention.
I was paying attention. I was trying so hard I could feel it in my teeth, a constant clench that never quite released. The fidgeting was the one thing that helped me pay attention.
When my father left, I searched for the rule I had broken. There must have been one. A missed cue. A moment when I failed to laugh at the right time or answer correctly or sit still enough. Children believe in causality the way they believe in gravity. Things fall because something let them go.
When my mother began smiling at her phone and tilting it away from me, I recalibrated. I spoke less. I retreated to my room more quickly. If love required less of me, I would reduce myself accordingly. I would become manageable.
She left anyway.
In the apartment with the two cats and the echo of absence, I made lists. Lists of groceries I needed. Lists of homework deadlines. Lists of self-improvements. Speak softer. Smile more. Do not interrupt. Do not cry. Do not make strange movements in public. I thought other children must be born with an internal compass for living. I thought mine had been assembled incorrectly, the needle spinning without direction.
When my father returned with a wife who smelled like flowers sharpened into something metallic, she looked at me with bright, appraising eyes. She bought me dresses in pastel colors. Pale pink. Powder blue. Fabrics that rasped against my skin like sandpaper dragged slowly over bone.
"It’s not that bad", she would say when I tugged at the sleeves. "You’ll get used to it."
In the bathroom later, I would claw at my arms, leaving red lines that rose and burned. The seam inside the dress felt like a wire sawing back and forth. Lace was not delicate, it was abrasive. It scraped and whispered and reminded me constantly that I was wearing something wrong.
I did not have the language to explain that the discomfort was not preference but pain. So I learned to endure it quietly, because endurance was something adults praised.
At school in that city, they found a different way to name me. They whistled for me across the courtyard.
"Come here", they called, patting their thighs.
When I froze, unsure whether to comply or pretend not to hear, they laughed. "Good girl", one of them said once, tossing a crumpled paper ball in my direction.
I did not tell my father. I did not tell her. I had learned that complaints became lectures about attitude. About resilience. About how the world would not bend for me. I was already bending. I was folding myself into smaller and smaller shapes, hoping eventually I would disappear into something acceptable.
Near the sea, for a brief stretch of years, the air tasted like salt and possibility. The light was softer there, filtered through clouds that rolled in from the horizon. A few girls let me sit with them at lunch. They did not snatch my glasses. They did not bark or whistle.
They asked me questions and waited for the answers.
Their kindness felt like stepping into warm water after years in the cold. I remember laughing once, truly laughing, and being startled by the sound of it. It came from somewhere unpracticed.
Back with my mother, at university, I approached adulthood as if it were an exam. I attended every lecture. I color-coded my notes. I timed my contributions in class so I would not speak too often or too little. If I initiated messages, people responded politely. If I did not, silence expanded like fog.
One day I stopped sending the first message.
I told myself it was an experiment. A neutral observation. If I mattered, they would notice.
My phone remained still. Days stretched into weeks. The silence confirmed what I had suspected since childhood : I was supplemental. Acceptable in small doses. Forgettable in absence.
Some professors adored me. They praised my essays, my artworks, the way I saw connections others missed. Others seemed irritated before I had even spoken, their expressions tightening when I raised my hand. I replayed those interactions at night, dissecting them for error.
Too direct ? Too intense ?
I adjusted.
By the time I entered my master’s program to become a teacher, I was no longer singular. I was curated.
The diligent student. The enthusiastic intern. The calm mediator. The confident presenter.
In front of a classroom, something aligned. There were expectations, clear and structured. I could script my warmth. I could project my voice at the correct volume. I could channel my intensity into lesson plans and animated explanations. A rhythm I could follow. Students paid attention to what I said, even the ones doodling on their textbooks. I never called them out on it.
My thesis was praised. Preserved as an example for future students. I should have felt proud, validated.
During my internship, my supervising teacher observed me for weeks before saying, almost casually, "It’s interesting. In front of the class you’re vibrant. But outside of it, you’re … different."
Different.
The word lodged in my chest like a splinter.
I smiled because the vibrant version of me would have smiled. But what I wanted to say was : of course I am different. That one is assembled, it is not me. She is built from borrowed parts.
I had been building her since childhood. Collecting gestures from others. Studying how admired teachers used their hands. Mimicking tones from television shows. I catalogued laughter, posture, pauses. I wore them like costumes and masks depending on the room.
Under fluorescent lights, with chairs scraping and conversations overlapping and fabrics itching against already frayed nerves, the mask was not vanity. It was survival.
And survival is exhausting.
By evening, my jaw ached from holding the correct expression. My hands bore crescent moons from nails pressed into skin to keep from flapping, from covering my ears, from betraying the strain beneath the surface.
Sometimes, even with the mask perfectly aligned, people still hesitated around me. As if they sensed the calculation beneath the smile. As if authenticity were a frequency I could not quite tune into.
For years, I thought this was a moral flaw. That I was deceitful. That I lacked some essential instinct others possessed without effort.
No one suggested another explanation.
No one noticed that the noise hurt. That the lights hurt. That certain fabrics felt like fire. That social rules felt like equations missing half their variables. They noticed only the outcomes : the quiet child. The shy teenager. The intense young woman.
Too sensitive. Too serious. Too antisocial. Too much and never enough.
Would it had been better if I disappeared ?
When I finally understood decades later, the answer arrived like a door unlocking in a house I had lived in my entire life.
Memories rearranged themselves. The noise. The exhaustion after social gatherings. The careful scripting. The fractures between my public and private selves.
I was not broken at life. I had been navigating a world not calibrated for me, blaming myself for every collision.
The anger came first. Slow and old. For the teachers who punished coping mechanisms. For the adults who forced lace over skin already burning. For the children who called me a dog and were never corrected. For the family who mistook overload for rebellion.
But beneath the anger was grief.
For the little girl covering her ears on the playground, believing she was weak. For the teenager scratching her arms raw in a bathroom, convinced she was dramatic. For the university student staring at a silent phone, concluding she was forgettable.
Every scene replayed in my mind in a new light, but I couldn't tell if it was a blessing or a curse. It hadn't been my fault when I had tried my best and failed. But it was never going to get easier, no matter how hard I tried.
All that time, I thought love required transformation.
I built masks sturdy enough to earn praise, to secure degrees, to command classrooms. I became so adept at performing that even I struggled to locate the original beneath the layers, the mask melding into the face so much that it became impossible to remove.
Maybe love is not staying. I learned that early. But maybe love is also not erasing yourself to be easier to keep.
There is a version of me still sitting under fluorescent lights, trying to calculate how to exist without disruption. She is tired. She is trying. She thinks she is failing.
I want to sit beside her and tell her the truth no one offered then :
You were never bad at life.
You were surviving it in a language no one around you understood.
And that is not a defect. It is a different kind of fluency.