Alaria:
I closed the door behind me and leaned against it, exhaling a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding in all day.
The weight of everything that I've been carrying finally settling on my chest as I did my best to try and stay calm.
The air in my room felt too still, too heavy. And no matter how hard I tried to talk normal, I knew that I couldn't.
Everything about today had felt like a slow unraveling. Like threads of my calm being tugged loose one by one, Darius’s words lingering in the back of my mind like poison I couldn’t wash out. His voice, his implications, the reminder of who I used to be… it all haunted me now.
It still forced me to focus on the words that he tried to use, the fact that he was looking into who I am, who I was, what I was becoming, and how I was in the
