Who am I?
I sat in the corner of my room, staring at the fragments scattered on the floor. The broken pieces of who I was, who I thought I was. I was a bowl—once whole, once perfect. But now, I was shattered, unable to hold anything without spilling.
I couldn’t remember when it had all started. The cracks, the fractures, they had been there for so long, I didn’t know if I had ever been whole. Maybe I had been broken from the beginning. Maybe I had always been like this—empty, fragile, searching for something to fill me, but never quite able to hold it.
Rosetta had seen it. She had seen through the mask, through the cracks I kept hidden. But even her kindness couldn’t fix me. She couldn’t piece me back together. No one could.
I was just a broken bowl, too shattered to ever be whole again.
I thought of the conversations we had, her soft words that made me feel seen, but never truly understood. I wanted to believe her when she said we would figure it out together. I wanted to believe that I could be something more than just the mask I wore, but every time I tried to fill the emptiness inside, it spilled. The cracks were too wide, too deep.
Who was I even trying to be?
I wasn’t the girl everyone saw in the halls. I wasn’t the one who laughed at jokes or participated in the conversations. That version of me was just a performance, a mask. But underneath it all, underneath the cracks and the brokenness, who was I?
I looked down at my hands, my fingers trembling. Who am I? I whispered the question to the empty room, the silence swallowing it whole. There was no answer.
I wasn’t the person Rosetta thought I was. I wasn’t the person anyone else thought I was.
I was just someone who existed, going through the motions of a life that didn’t feel real.
The emptiness inside me stretched wider, deeper. I could feel it gnawing at my insides, like a hunger that could never be satisfied.
I wasn’t broken because of what happened to me. I was broken because of what I had lost. What I had never had. A sense of self, a sense of belonging.
I closed my eyes, the tears threatening to spill once again. I was a puzzle that didn’t have all the pieces. I was a story that didn’t have an ending. I was a broken bowl, too shattered to be fixed.
And maybe that was all I would ever be.
Maybe the question wasn’t who am I? Maybe it was who will I ever be? And if I was honest, I didn’t know if there was even an answer to that.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be here still alive to be honest.