I got what I wanted.
And it ruined me.

Not all at once but slowly, quietly,
like mold blooming behind the drywall.

There was no applause.
No shift in gravity.
No bright line between before and after.
Just me, holding what I thought I needed, and realizing it felt
exactly the same as not having it.

The wanting had texture.
Direction.
A kind of holiness.
It gave me something to reach for, to wrap my hands around in the dark.

But arrival?
Arrival was airless.
Flat.
A mouthful of sweetness gone stale before I could swallow.

And then the shame crept in.

Because how do you grieve the thing you asked for?
The thing you begged for, prayed for, waited years to touch?

How do you tell people you worked this hard
only to find there’s nothing here worth keeping?

They don’t make language for that kind of sorrow.
The quiet kind.
The kind you can’t scream about because on paper, you’re lucky.
You’re fine.

But inside, you’re unraveling.
Inside, it’s splinters.
Inside, it’s Oh God, what now?

The recovery is clumsy.
Not noble.
Not clean.
Just desperation in slow motion.

The retreat.
The reckoning.
The letting go of something you already sacrificed too much to get.

You try to remember who you were before the wanting.
You try to rebuild a center that isn’t wrapped around the thing
you no longer believe in.

And some days, the air still tastes like failure.
Some days, your own name feels like a stranger’s.

But you keep moving.
You drink water.
You breathe on purpose.
You put distance between you and the illusion.

You start to dream again.
Not big—not yet.
Just small things.
A warm room.
A quiet morning.
A life that doesn’t depend on the next thing
to finally feel like enough.