Prologue
I've never told anyone what I truly think about life. Not a single person. Not a single living soul. For years, something has quietly lived inside me. Maybe I've carried it alone for too long. So this is my chance, not to explain my life, but simply to tell it.
Some stories are ones I'm proud of, the ones that brought happiness into my life. Others were the darkest moments of my life, leaving me feeling hollow and empty.
I'm sitting on a park bench, it's cold, and snow is falling today. I'm holding an empty notebook, as empty as the park around me. I click my pen, getting myself ready to write. Nothing comes in mind, so I can't help but sighed. I turn my head up to look at the sky. It's always my favorite thing to do since I was a little kid. I could watch the stars twinkle for hours, and they never seem to change. No matter how long I stare at them, they remain the same. But when the day passes and night returns once more, the stars are never quite the same.
I wonder, did they shift when my eyes weren't looking? Or did it shift because it had the chance to leave when the sun shines so bright?
Maybe we are just like the stars. We don't notice ourselves changing because we're there for every second of it. We wake up believing we're the same person every morning, until one day we look back and realize we've become someone our younger selves would never recognize. The change was never sudden. We were simply too close to ourselves to see it.
Even so, I like looking at it, as if part of me wishes I could disappear among the stars. Eventually, I lower my gaze to my empty notebook, waiting for me to write something. I close my eyes and feel the breeze, the fresh air, the wind brushing against my skin, the quiet sound of it filling my ears.
Now, I'm ready to write.
I'm a 22-year-old girl, living in Melbourne, majoring in psychology. You'd probably think I'd have the answers. But no, there are still so many questions I don't know how to answer. I spent so much time taking care of everyone else that I forgot the one person I'd neglected the most: myself. I've spent years holding space for everyone else's pain, but never my own.
But life has left its fingerprints on me. Some memories still warm me whenever I stumble upon them. Others are wounds that never quite learned how to heal. There were days I couldn't bear the weight of being alive, and days I loved the world so deeply that I wished time would stop. Somehow, both versions of me are still here.
Either way, this is my life.
For years, these thoughts lived only inside me, spoken to no one. Maybe they were never meant to stay there forever. So before time changes me once again, I'll leave them here.
These are the things I never said.
