I’ve spent years learning how to disappear — slowly, quietly, like a flower folding in on itself when the sun no longer shows up.
It’s a kind of closing that doesn’t happen all at once, but through small betrayals: a withheld thought, a silenced need, a smile that replaces truth. Not by choice, but by instinct.
“When you live in a world that prefers petals over roots, softness over strength, you start to think maybe shrinking is survival.”
If you wilt gracefully enough, no one will call it dying.
I didn’t know how else to exist in a world that preferred me smaller. More palatable. Easier to carry.
If you’re quiet, you’re dismissed. If you’re loud, you’re too much. So you learn to live in the in-between — muted, but functional. Not invisible, but barely seen.
It’s a soft suffocation no one interrupts, because you’ve been taught to never stop smiling.
When Your Voice Hits a Wall
Sometimes I speak, and it feels like my voice hits a wall mid-sentence — flattening against the air before it can ever settle into someone’s understanding.
And I keep talking anyway, because stopping would feel like admitting defeat.
“Silence can gut you. Indifference can carve you out from the inside.”
There’s a violence in being ignored while you’re speaking the most tender part of your truth.
The Sound of Not Being Held
It’s not that they don’t hear me. It’s that they don’t hold me.
They hear me, sure, but only in the way thunder is heard from behind glass — distant, distorted, unthreatening.
My voice reaches them in fragments, filtered through walls they built long before I spoke.
I watch their eyes glaze, their focus shift. The slow exhale of someone waiting for me to finish — not because they’re moved, but because they’re bored.
Still, I speak. Because it costs me something not to.
Refusing to Die
I’ve shown up fully in rooms that never made space for me.
I’ve loved people who never really saw every part of me.
I’ve spoken the loudest truths I had and watched them drip down the walls like condensation — visible for a moment, then gone before they could settle into anyone’s bones.
And yet —
Even in the ache, something in me refused to die.
Even as I collapsed under the weight of doubt, I kept dragging myself forward.
Not with grace. Not with clarity.
But with a raw, stubborn pulse that said, keep going.
Maybe one day, I’d remember what it felt like to matter to myself.
And slowly, I did.
Mirrors Along the Way
There are people you meet along the way who hold up mirrors when you need them most.
They don’t fix you. They don’t rescue you.
But they reflect you — fully, clearly, without flinching.
And in their eyes, you catch glimpses of something more durable than survival.
“Something luminous. Something undeniably yours.”
But the danger is this: linger too long in the reflection, and you risk forgetting that mirrors don’t move — you do.
Fixation becomes a trap.
And no matter how sacred the mirror, you can’t live inside a gaze.
Living Here, Not There
I thank the ones who saw me. Who showed me back to myself when I was fragmented.
But I don’t live there.
I live in this — the muscle, the marrow, the momentum.
My Truth
I am not thunder behind glass. I am the sky breaking open.
I am not someone you hear and forget.
I am someone you feel.
I am not a placeholder.
I am a presence.
I am the storm and the stillness. The blade and the burn.
I am the hand that held the flame too long and still reached for more.
I am the one who cracked open and wrote maps in the fractures.
The one who stood in the wreckage and asked, “What can I build from this?”
The one who let grief pass through her and, instead of allowing it to redefine her, demanded it reshape her.
“I am the laugh in the middle of the breakdown. The sentence no one saw coming, but everyone needed. The truth that stayed after comfort left.”
The Shape of Edgeless Love
I’m no longer asking the world to reflect me.
I gathered all my fragments after I was broken and rebuilt a lighthouse inside myself — so I’d never need someone else’s flame.
The shape of edgeless love?
It looks like the aftermath and the alchemy.
Like a scar that glows.
Like someone who doesn’t just survive, but builds something sacred from the wreckage.
It looks like a woman who no longer seeks shelter in someone else’s gaze, because she’s built something steadier within.
It looks like a woman who could’ve disappeared — and stood anyway.
Who could’ve hardened — and still chose softness.
Who could’ve stayed small — but chose instead to stretch so far into her own becoming that the world had no choice but to make room.
© 2025 Kimberly Beth Thomas. All rights reserved.
What does “edgeless love” look like to you?
Drop your story in the comments—I’d love to hear it.