Justdanica - ((hot))

She doesn’t tell them the rest. That a morning star is not a star at all, but a planet—Venus—the one that shines brightest just before dawn, when the night is darkest. The one that refuses to go out.

That was three years ago. Today, she is thirty-two. She still works nights, but now she keeps a journal in her locker—a blue one with a cracked spine. She still holds dying children’s hands, but now she lets herself cry in the break room afterward, and the other nurses don’t stare. They bring her tea. justdanica

At seventeen, she fell in love for the first time. His name was Elias, and he smelled like rain and old books. He saw her—really saw her—in a way that felt like being caught in headlights and held there. “You’re so quiet,” he said once, tracing the inside of her wrist. “But your hands speak.” For six months, she let herself believe that maybe cracks could be filled with gold, like kintsugi. That maybe broken things could become beautiful. She doesn’t tell them the rest

It wasn’t a pretty scream. It was ugly and raw and it tore out of her throat like an animal escaping a trap. She screamed until her voice gave out, until the rain softened, until a trucker in the next lane slowed down, watching with wide eyes through the fogged glass. That was three years ago

By fourteen, she had mastered the art of being two people. There was Justdanica in the classroom—straight A’s, hair brushed, hand raised—and there was the other one, the one who lay awake at 2 a.m. counting the ceiling tiles, wondering if a person could dissolve from loneliness while still breathing. She wrote poems in the margins of her notebooks, then erased them. She learned that silence is a language, too. And she became fluent.

So Justdanica learned to keep her fractures on the inside, where no one could see the hairline cracks spreading like winter frost on a windowpane.

When the tears stopped, the rain had stopped, too. The world smelled like wet asphalt and something green—something growing.