The world is uncomfortable with what it cannot see. We are taught to rally against cancer, to wage wars on failing organs, but we do not know how to hold space for the quiet, interior battles. We turn away from suffering that does not bleed, does not show itself in scars and statistics. And yet, pain is pain. It does not lessen because it is unseen.

My heart is dying, but not in the romantic way. Not in the way they write about in poems. It is shriveling, it is gasping, it is clenched so tight it cannot beat properly. They tell me the name for it—stress cardiomyopathy—so neat, so clinical. A heart giving up, not from clots or cholesterol, but from grief, from strain, from the sheer unbearable weight of being alive.