Writers Jam

Cowardice is a disease that I’ve been infested with for years now. It seeped in quietly between every unsent text and unsaid word.It began with you– the embers of a burning home that I was too afraid to leave, and too guilty to save.

At night, I lie awake with the rusty taste of guilt dripping down my throat— your name, a secret that throbs at the bedrock of my mind. Cowardice was a viral fever that flared up with every changing season,spreading with every glance I took at you. The body remembers what the heart forgets– the warmth of your name, the daunting echo of something that could have been love.

I believed we would stay pure in restraint,but I’ve become tainted by your half-smiles and the slow hum of your memory haunting me in the most mundane ways– like you cooking Maggi for the two of us with a broken arm.

Somewhere between the ache of two separate worlds, time with you felt like the existence of two people pretending the world wasn’t watching. Now, months later, you live somewhere past my reach, and I live in the hollow space of things we should have said. You were everywhere and nowhere at once. I thought time would heal, but it only taught me how to become perfectly performative at moving on.

Maybe cowardice isn’t fear. Maybe it’s timing—loving someone in the wrong lifetime and watching your own heart rot under the weight of its denial.

And even after all this if you ever wonder why I disappeared— just know it wasn’t indifference. It was infection.