They say I’ve got
a heart of stone—
like I woke up this way,
cold from the beginning,
untouched by anything
that ever tried to reach me.
But stone
isn’t born hard.
It becomes that way
through pressure,
through weather,
through years
of standing in storms
with no shelter.
People see the surface
and stop there.
They don’t see
how many times
I tried to love softly,
how many times
I opened my hands
just to watch
everything good
slip through them.
So I learned.
Learned how to close off
before something
could get close enough
to ruin me again.
Learned how to act indifferent,
how to keep my voice steady,
how to pretend
nothing touches me anymore.
But pretending
and feeling nothing
aren’t the same thing.
Because even stone
remembers pressure.
Even stone
can crack.
And underneath
everything hardened in me—
under the distance,
the silence,
the walls I built
to survive—
there’s still a heart there.
Just one
that got tired
of bleeding
every time
it tried to be soft.
Through the Fog 