THEN WHAT
They asked me to feel maybe even write to unravel the pain I hide way deep inside.
But I’m afraid.
Afraid that if I slip into the abyss of my own making not even poetry can save me.
But maybe that’s what I need absolution before solutions.
So here it is, in plain and white.
But no today I won’t speak of the one who recently shattered my heart.
Not today.
Today, I want to talk of something else.
Something more.
One month.
That’s all we get.
Thirty days to feel, before we go back to shrinking, back to holding in our tears like our fathers taught us and their fathers before them.
I look around with the same eyes my father had.
Never really saw the struggle he tucked behind his smile but sometimes it slipped, just a flicker.
Too painful to ignore, too human to hide.
I wonder how much he held in before going back to our Father.
I wonder how many men carried wars inside them with no medals to show for it.
How many dreams were buried next to the boy they silenced just to survive?!
I’ve seen too many of us put flowers in empty vases hoping beauty might fill the hollow.
We say “I’m good” with cracked voices and trembling hands, because honesty still feels like weakness in a world that only applauds composure.
But I’ve learned we don’t die when breath leaves the body.
We die when the inner child goes quiet, and we keep walking around like museums of pain no one visits.
A generation of ghosts, men who were taught to stay silent, even when it killed them.
A lineage of locked jaws and swallowed grief passed down like wedding rings, but heavier.
A history of hands that built homes but never held their sons of eyes that watched, but never wept.
A cycle that praised survival and punished softness, that told us “strong” means “alone.”
But I stand here now—spine crooked from the weight with the chance to choose differently.
To be the fracture in the pattern.
The first whisper after centuries of silence and maybe that’s what this month should’ve been.
Not a performance, not a box ticked, but a reckoning.
A remembering.
That men cry too.
That we feel.
That we fall apart.
And that healing starts not in noise but in the quiet confession,
"I need help."
So here it is.
Not for applause.
Not for pity.
But maybe for the boy still inside me
who just wanted to be seen and told
“You don’t have to carry all of this alone.”
And I won’t lie it’s hard being a man right now.
Not because we’re the victims but because sometimes it feels like no one believes we can be.
I see the tweets.
“Men are trash.”
“Fear men.”
And it’s not that I don’t get it.
It’s not that I don’t know some of us carry knives where hearts should be but what happens to the rest of us?!
The ones trying to build not break?!
The ones who are still learning but showing up anyway?!
What happens when we become guilty by association and our love is weighed against
our wallets?!
When “being there” isn’t enough unless there’s a transaction?!
I talked to a girl yesterday.
She asked me to send her money to braid her hair and maybe that’s normal now.
But it made me pause.
Because I didn’t even know her like that.
And I wondered when did love become an invoice?!
When did affection start coming with terms and conditions?!
We talk about red flags, but sometimes I wonder
if we’re even trying to build or just competing to not be the one who gets hurt first.
It’s not an attack.
This isn’t bitterness dressed in verse.
It’s just a sigh.
A tired breath from a man who’s trying to love better, to be better, to unlearn what broke his father and still feel like he’s being seen through a lens he didn’t ask for.
My relationship with my father it was complicated.
Towards the end, we found some understanding but it was heavy with expectation.
Not because he didn’t believe in me but maybe because he believed too much, in ways I couldn’t reach.
I wasn’t always the son he imagined, the version of “good” he saw in his head.
And maybe that’s the quiet story of so many of us men trying to live up to a shadow while we’re still figuring out how to stand in our own light.
I look around and I see the same struggle echoed friends who never had a straight line with their fathers, or worse, no line at all.
For us men, that absence sometimes feels like a map without a legend.
Fathers who didn’t hug or didn’t know how to say they loved us.
Husbands caught between being providers and feeling present sometimes losing both roles in the noise of what’s expected.
And what about being role models?!
We want to show strength but strength isn’t just muscle or money it’s vulnerability, too.
It’s saying “I don’t know,” and meaning it.
It’s teaching the boys who watch us that it’s okay to bleed, to ask for help, to be human.
Because if we don’t break the cycle, who will?!
This is why I was afraid because one line opens another, like Pandora’s box stretching infinite across time.
Chains we once carried, even after we were set free, our minds remained shackled and our hearts once loved and shattered chose to cage themselves in safe little corners.
Because heartbreak can tip you over to the other side.
I’m not saying we’re great hell, sometimes I can’t even convince myself of that but damn, sometimes we carry so much pain, hold so many silent storms inside, that if we all dared to open up our minds, the world would wonder, how we manage not to break.
How we don’t go mad.
Maybe that’s the real weight not the battles we fight out loud but the quiet wars inside these chests, the bruises no one sees, the nights we don’t sleep, the prayers whispered when no one’s listening and the tears we swallow because showing them feels like defeat.
But here we are still breathing, still fighting, still trying to be something better than what was handed down.
And maybe that’s enough for now.
One month.
30 days.
4 weeks.
Then what?!