The sky outside her window was just beginning to glow with the weary orange of dawn, but Emma had already been awake for hours.
Sleep had long stopped being her friend.
She lay there, eyes open, tracing cracks on the ceiling - the same way her heart had been cracked years ago, long before she learned how to pretend.
Back then, she was just a girl. A sweet, hopeful girl from the suburbs, not too far from the city lights, yet far enough to grow up with dirt on her feet and dreams in her heart.
She was only sixteen when she met him - the first one.
He was older. Wiser. A man with eyes that smiled and words that curled like smoke into her soul. He told her she was special. Different. That her laugh could melt ice and her body was a temple he would never defile.
He lied.
He came like warmth and left like winter. Used her, slowly, carefully - not with fists but with flattery. He made her believe she was loved, and when he had taken all she had to offer, he vanished.
No goodbye. No explanation. Just emptiness.
That was her first lesson in love - that it was a currency some men used to buy pleasure. And she, foolish and young, had been too cheap a price.
She cried for weeks. But time, as it does, moved on.
And then came the second boy.
She was seventeen, barely healing from the first storm when he showed up - full of poetry, full of fire. He was her age. Said all the right things. Made her feel safe again. Human.
He told her he loved her. That he saw her soul.
And again, she believed.
But his love came with secrets - darker ones. Words spoken in hallways, text messages she wasn't meant to see, rumors that reached her like knives in the back. And one day, the truth: she was a game. A conquest. Another checkmark in his teenage fantasies.
It broke her. But what shattered her completely was the consequence left behind - one that couldn't be erased or ignored.
A child.
She didn't speak of it. Not to anyone. Not even to herself.
For months, she hid. Alone, terrified, clinging to denial. Until reality became too loud to silence. And she had to make choices no seventeen-year-old should ever have to make.
It was in those nights - between the fear and the shame - that Emma began to die... and the woman the world now saw was born.
The one with the hard eyes. The sarcastic tone. The "don't come near me" energy.
That woman wasn't born of strength. She was forged in survival.
Because after being broken twice, Emma no longer trusted the world with her heart - or her story.
---
By the time she turned twenty-five, she had mastered the art of appearing whole.
Her colleagues at work never asked questions. The ones who gossiped behind her back didn't know the version of Emma who curled up on the bathroom floor at night, whispering prayers she wasn't sure anyone heard.
Her life now was routine. Wake. Work. Endure. Repeat.
But sometimes... when the world grew quiet and the weight of silence fell heavy on her chest... she would touch the invisible scar inside her. And wonder if she was ever meant to be more than a broken pot holding herself together with invisible glue.
She wasn't looking for love anymore. Not even friendship.
What she wanted was peace. A breath of fresh air in a world that had suffocated her since she was a girl.
Maybe she will have some peace, but the world knows no peace...
To be continued...