From Broken Roots

Sadly, my face is a reflection of two people who never loved each other. I carry their resentment in the shape of my eyes, the angles of my cheekbones, the curve of my mouth, features passed down like unwanted heirlooms. I wonder if they ever looked at me and saw pieces of each other, if my existence was a constant reminder of a love that never was, or if they looked past me, pretending that I was just an unfortunate accident of fate. Most people are born from love, wrapped in warmth before taking their first breath. Others, like me, are born from silence, from obligation, from the bitter aftertaste of choices made too young or too recklessly. And when you grow up as proof of something broken, you learn to carry its weight without being asked. It settles into you, molding not only the contours of your identity but the very lens through which you perceive the world. For if the two who gave life to you could not evoke even the faintest trace of love for one another, then what precisely are you? A mere aberration, an unfortunate consequence of their discord. A living testament to their irreconcilable differences. Or perhaps, a lingering symbol of something that should never have existed in the first place. I have spent years trying to unearth myself from them, peeling away the parts of me that feel borrowed, inherited, or imposed. No matter how far I run, my reflection remains, an unspoken history written into my skin. Did they ever look at me and feel regret? Or worse, indifference? I do not know what is harder to live with, the knowledge that I was never the result of love or the fear that I may never know what love truly looks like. I wonder if they ever attempted to summon love. Did they, in some moment of misguided hope, believe they could mold something real out of the emptiness between them? With each passing year, did the love wither in the wake of marriage, eroded by the weight of duty, the slow unraveling of illusion beneath the strain of responsibility? Or if they merely resigned themselves to the inevitable, two unwilling architects constructing a life around a hollow foundation, their disdain etched into the silence that stretched between them. Regardless of intent, I remain a living artifact of their failure, a physical embodiment of a bond that was never forged in warmth. My face is an uneasy truce between them, a fusion of features that do not belong together, and a silent testament to incompatibility. I am the sum of mismatched parts, the residue of a story that should never have been written. Because of them, I know deceit like the back of my hand. I was raised in its shadow, watching words mean nothing, watching actions contradict promises. I have seen love turned into a performance, a currency, a means to an end and so I have learned to doubt its sincerity, to brace for the moment when even the kindest of gestures reveal their hidden conditions. I know that, like everything else, it will eventually fade leaving you stranded, staring at shattered remains. Growing up in a house devoid of love was not defined by the absence of sound, it was the presence of something far heavier, an unacknowledged burden that presses against the walls, thickens the air, and weaves itself into the very fabric of your being. It is the quiet suffocation of something missing yet palpable, an emptiness so profound that it becomes its own kind of presence. There were no lingering glances, no gentle touches, no small, unguarded moments of tenderness that could have reassured me that once upon a time they had chosen each other willingly. Instead, love was a ghost, long departed before I had even arrived. What remained in its wake were sharp-edged words, spoken in hushed yet weighted tones when they thought I was not listening. There were silences so vast they swallowed the house whole, bridging the space between them like a chasm too wide to cross. A home like that does not simply raise you, it instructs you in ways it never intends to. You become fluent in the language of avoidance, attuned to the subtle shifts in tone, the clipped responses, and the careful arrangement of words designed to conceal more than they reveal. You learn that a slammed door carries more weight than a thousand voiced realities. You master the art of shrinking, of treading lightly, of existing without drawing too much attention, because love, in a place like that, is not a given. It is a negotiable asset, conditional and fleeting if it exists at all. It is a language they never taught me, a dialect I was never meant to speak. I question if it is encoded into the marrow of those born from it, if there are people who, from the moment they enter the world, instinctively understand how to receive and reciprocate tenderness. Love for them is not something to be questioned or analyzed but something as intrinsic as breath. I envy them, the ones who do not flinch at softness, who do not brace for impact when kindness is extended, who do not carry the gnawing certainty that love is always conditional, always fleeting. It is a cruel revelation to understand that you were never born from love, that your existence was not the culmination of devotion but the consequence of misalignment. To know that the very architects of your being were never meant to build a life together, they were never meant to be.