They warn you, when you take the crown, that the cycle will ask something of you eventually. They don’t warn you it will ask everything.

I used to think that dying young without feeling fulfilled was a nightmare. Now I know the nightmare was always going to be mine, I just didn’t know when, or for whom.

I’ve been a prisoner. A leader. A liar, to everyone but him, and eventually, to him too. I have loved with the kind of hunger that changes the way you see the world, and I have lost with the kind of grief that does the same. We once crossed our blood to bind two lives into one language only the two of us could speak. Tonight, I let go of my half of that sentence.

I told myself, once, that surviving was its own kind of victory. I don’t believe that anymore. Survival was just the space between debts.And tonight, the debt is due.

As I fall now, I revisit the body that hasn’t yet learned what it would cost to survive, in a life I never would have chosen for myself.

I see it all burst before my eyes. How I got here in the first place.