The Chain I Drag Behind Me

(a monologue/reflection)

It’s true. I’m finally being fully honest with myself about it.

The truth has been lingering under my skin for years, pacing, tapping, whispering whenever the silence got too long. And tonight, it no longer feels merciful to keep lying to myself. I keep trying to convince my heart that I was loved like a daughter once, but the memory doesn’t fit the shape of that word anymore.

When I lived with the Stokes, it felt …for a fleeting, fragile moment in this life of mine…like the world had cracked open and something close to normalcy poured out. They promised me family. They promised I belonged. They promised I wasn’t just passing through.

But promises, in my life, are dangerous things.

My father used to make them like he was tossing seeds into a field of ash … promises that never took root. Aunt Misty did the same. I promise became a lullaby for disappointment. I learned young that words can masquerade as love, that tone and timing can mimic devotion even when it isn’t real. So I made myself a vow, the only promise I’ve ever kept to myself, that I would never say those words unless I meant them, unless I could carve them into my own bones first. Because promises aren’t small things. Not to me. Not ever.

I was placed in seven foster homes before I turned eighteen. The Stokes were the fourth. I stayed nine months — just long enough to believe they might actually want to keep me. Just long enough for their house to start smelling like safety, for my toothbrush to feel permanent, for my heart to stop pacing the door at night waiting for someone to send me away. Nine months: the length of time it takes to grow a baby. The length of time it took for me to be reborn into hope …and then discarded back into the cold world of a government system shuffling me and others around and shoving us in homes they government barely makes sure of foster kids’ safety.

When I left, I carried my generational chain of pain behind me. I didn’t know it had blades. I didn’t know how to hold it without cutting others, without cutting myself. I was still a child trying to learn the language of staying. But staying was never my dialect. I grew up fluent in leaving, fluent in silence, fluent in pretending I wasn’t devastated every time another door closed.

And yet, I stayed in contact with them. Maybe out of longing. Maybe out of guilt. Maybe because a part of me still wanted to prove that I was worthy of being remembered. That I wasn’t just the ghost who slept in their extra room for a season and disappeared when the air got too heavy.

Sometimes I wonder if I made things worse …clinging to a bond that was never meant to be sustained. Maybe I reminded them of their own failure to follow through. Maybe I kept resurrecting a version of us that was supposed to stay buried. But how do you bury something that still beats, even faintly, deep in your marrow and heart?

I am scared …terrified, really… that my inability to let go has made me smaller in their eyes. A burden. A memory they wish would stop breathing.

I want to believe I was loved. Maybe I was. Maybe I still am, in some distant, polite way. But I am not seen as a daughter. Not as a sister. Not as a soul that shaped their lives permanently. And the hardest part is realizing I can’t keep pretending such things will happen.

Sometimes I tell myself that if I had been easier to love …less shy, less awkward, less haunted …maybe they would have kept me. But that’s the cruel trick of trauma…. it convinces you that your pain is the reason you weren’t chosen, instead of the reason you needed to be.

I have always felt like discarded trash …something once useful, once curious, once adored, now inconvenient. I am not ashamed to say that out loud anymore. The shame has already eaten its fill of me.

And yet, I am so small, and so big. Small enough to vanish between the cracks of other people’s attention, big enough to feel the entire weight of what was lost. My heart expands like an echo … it refuses to shrink to fit the size of what’s been given.

I know now that what I wanted wasn’t adoption, not really. It was permanence. It was being chosen, even when inconvenient. It was being seen through the lens of still here, not once was.

My life has been a series of almosts. Almost adopted. Almost loved. Almost safe. Almost stable. Almost secure. Almost independent. Almost better.

… I think that’s what makes me dangerous … I’ve learned to survive on the ghost of what could have been.

When I look back, I see myself as a teen sitting on the edge of a couch that wasn’t mine, legs tucked under, trying to laugh at the right times, to be light enough not to make the furniture creak. Trying to be good enough to keep. And maybe they saw that. Maybe they loved the performance… the polite, fragile, bright-eyed version of me. But no one ever saw the exhaustion that came after the guests left. The small girl who’d stare at the ceiling and think, I am pretending my way into love again.

Years later, I still find myself pretending. Smiling at old photos, looking at old Christmas cards, trying to stay connected to the ghost of that family. It’s a strange sort of self-harm … emotional taxidermy. Keeping a dead thing posed to look alive.

But tonight, I am admitting it… I was not their daughter. And that doesn’t make me unworthy of love. It just makes me someone who has been trying too long to turn an almost into a forever.

I can see now that what I’ve been carrying is not just grief, but inertia. I’ve been dragging that nine-month heartbeat of hope for over a decade, replaying it like an old film reel that keeps burning in the projector light.

The truth is, I am haunted by the idea of what I could have been if someone had kept me. Not perfect … I don’t need perfection. Just kept. Just chosen. Just allowed to grow roots without someone pulling me out to inspect the soil.

I wonder if they’ll ever think of me. If the Stokes will ever say my name in passing … not with pity, but with tenderness. If they’ll  ever wonder who I became. Or if they’ve filed me away under “that sweet girl we tried to help.”

It’s strange how abandonment can coexist with gratitude. I am grateful they tried. I am also angry that trying was all they did. But mostly, I am tired … tired of making excuses for why people couldn’t love me the way I needed.

The older I get, the more I realize how much of my life has been shaped by other people’s thresholds … their capacity, their fear, their convenience. I have lived on the outskirts of other people’s comfort zones.

And yet, even now, even knowing all this, I still want to believe that love can outlast circumstance. That somewhere in the fibers of what was real between us, there remains a trace of something holy.

I think about the version of me that existed in their home … the one who thought she had finally found her forever. I wish I could hold her hand. I wish I could tell her that the love she gave wasn’t wasted just because it wasn’t returned in the way she needed.

Because love is never wasted. It’s misplaced sometimes, misunderstood, cut short …but it’s never wasted.

I know my story is stitched from trauma …all these diagnoses… where my own body feels like both weapon and wound. But beneath all that, there is still a pulse of hope. A pulse that says: you are allowed to keep loving, even if it never gets you adopted.

Maybe the point was never to be someone’s daughter. Maybe the point is to understand that I’ve been mothering myself all along … holding my own trembling hands through the night, promising myself what no one else ever could.

And that promise, my promise, means something. It always has.

When I say I promise, I mean it in the marrow-deep way my father never did. I mean it in the way Aunt Misty never understood…  that words can either heal or haunt, and I choose healing, even if it comes slow.

So here I am, at the edge of the past, looking back one last time. I’m not angry anymore, not exactly. Just hollowed out in a way that makes room for truth. I am not their daughter. They are not my family. But for nine months (and 12 years after) we were a temporary constellation … light that flickered before the dark.

And I’m still carrying that light. It burns quieter now, but it hasn’t gone out.

Maybe one day I’ll stop checking their names online, stop wondering if they ever talk about me. Maybe I’ll stop rehearsing the what-ifs. But tonight, I’m allowing myself to grieve …not the people, but the promise.

Because that’s what I lost: a promise that never existed outside of words. A promise that turned to smoke.

And yet, somehow, I am still here. Still writing. Still breathing. Still reaching for meaning in those ashes. As per usual.

I am not trash. I am the earth that grows back after the fire.

And this …this speaking, this remembering, this brutal honesty … is the closest thing I’ve ever had to home.