The Pedestal
written by: S. Rin
I hear the echoes of all things I avoided, and the pain I tried to predict.
“You haven’t lost hope in love. If you had, you wouldn’t be talking to me, you have lost hope in safety. He can be a healing bath or a drowning sea.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.
You are a brilliant, logical, beautiful, and “sober” fortress. But the tragedy of a fortress is that no one lives inside it.”
And there I was, the stoic persona of nothingness, hiding the wounded warrior from taking her last breath. My walls, my fortress, all in the name of preserving what was left of my innocence and child-like wonder.
“All I’m offering is my hand to hold, not to take but to give you all that I am. I will slowly seep through the cracks. I don’t want to break your fortress; I want to be the reason you finally feel safe enough to open the gate. Allow me to nurture the soil of this battlefield that was once a garden.”
But I was simply a girl; a child with no place to call home—a ghost in my own house with wounds I couldn’t reach on my own…and every possible touch felt like a precursor for a new wound.
He said he didn’t want to tear down the fortress; he wanted to be the reason I didn’t need it so much anymore. And still… my nervous system remembers things my heart wishes it didn’t.
Every gentle touch feels like it might turn sharp.
Every soft beginning carries the ghost of a hard ending.
Because beneath the self-awareness and the coping strategies and the “I’m good on my own” mantra…I’m still just someone who learned too early how to survive without feeling held. And that kind of independence doesn’t disappear overnight.
It softens slowly.
If it softens at all.
- The Pedestal - May 6, 2026
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