Cycle I · “The Hidden Voice” · 05

She’s sitting on the floor with her back against her bed, phone in one hand, old notebook open in the other. On the screen: a half-written message to someone new. In the notebook: a list she made two years ago of “everything I’ve learned so far.”

Back then, she’d written things like:

“Never trust anyone who calls you ‘mine’ in the first week”
“I am not built for casual”
“Aftercare is non-negotiable”

She remembers how certain she felt writing it.

How grown. How “done learning.”

Then she looks at the last year:

One situationship that felt like a dynamic until it didn’t,
One “friend” she let tie her up because she didn’t want to be difficult,
Three different times she promised herself, “Never again,” and then did a softer version of again anyway.

She reads the poem’s lines in her head:

When you grow older…

When you grow with another…

When you’ve done both enough…

and realizes she’s been treating “enough” like a finish line:

Enough partners,
Enough mistakes,
Enough scenes to finally qualify as someone who “knows better.”

What actually feels true, sitting there with her back starting to ache against the bed frame, is simpler and more annoying:

She is older than the girl who wrote that list.

She has grown with more than one person now.

And yet the question still lands the same way in her chest:

When will it be enough?

She doesn’t get an answer.

But when she looks back at the half-written message, she quietly deletes one line—the one where she almost offered more of herself than she knew how to hold.

It’s not a revelation.

It’s not closure.

It’s just the tiniest adjustment from:

“I should already have this figured out”

to:

“I’m still figuring this out,

and that’s exactly why I’m allowed to go slower.”

Cycle I · “The Hidden Voice” · 05

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