zaina alshehhi

Before I ever held you, before I ever knew the color of your eyes, or the sound of your laughter, I already loved you enough to fear for you. Not the world. Not heartbreak. Not failure. I feared that one day you might wake beneath the same sky and feel the same unbearable weight that has followed me for years. I feared that something unseen, something buried quietly in my blood, might one day whisper your name the way it whispered mine. If there is anything I have ever truly wanted, it is this. Let it end with me. Take my smile, my kindness, my stubborn hope, my endless love. Take every beautiful thing I have ever been. Let those become yours. But leave behind the nights that refused to end. Leave behind the mornings that felt heavier than mountains. Leave behind the battles that no one could see, yet somehow left me more exhausted than any wound ever could. I have spent years learning how to survive a mind that sometimes forgot it was supposed to protect me. A mind that could turn joy into guilt. Peace into suspicion. Love into fear of losing it. Silence into something that could scream. I know its voice. I know how gently it lies. I know how patiently it waits. I know how it convinces you that you are becoming a burden to the very people you would die for. I know how it steals ordinary days until simply getting out of bed feels like climbing toward a sun that never rises. I know it because I have lived beside it for so long that sometimes I forget who is speaking. But let my child never know that confusion. Let them never wonder whether the sadness belongs to the day or to themselves. Let them never question whether happiness is something other people deserve more. Let them never become afraid of their own reflection. If pain must survive, let it survive in me. If suffering demands a place to live, let my heart be its final home. If there is a price for my child to inherit peace, let every coin be taken from me. Take every sleepless night. Every panic. Every trembling breath. Every invisible war. Every tear I never allowed to fall. Give them all to me again and again for as long as I have breath. I would carry them a thousand lifetimes if it meant my child could spend one day never knowing what they feel like. I would become the wall between them and every shadow. I would stand where the darkness begins so it never learns the sound of their heartbeat. I would let it know my name forever if it promised to forget theirs. Because this illness has already taken enough. It has stolen years I can never ask back for. It has stolen moments that should have been beautiful. It has turned ordinary memories into battles. It has taught me what it feels like to lose pieces of yourself while your heart is still beating. It may have chosen me. But it does not get to choose my child. I refuse to let my blood become its invitation. I refuse to let my love carry its cruelty. I refuse to believe that the story must repeat itself. If I have to spend the rest of my life fighting a war inside my own mind, then let every battle be fought inside me alone. Let every wound stop here. Let every scar lose its meaning here. Let every nightmare forget the road to my child’s heart. One day when I watch them run without fear, when I hear them laugh without forcing it, when I see them sleep without invisible battles waiting behind closed eyes, I will know that every painful day I survived was not meaningless. And if they ever ask me what the greatest act of love I ever gave them was, I will not tell them about the nights I cried. I will not tell them about the battles they never saw. I will simply hold them a little tighter, kiss their forehead, and silently thank life that every darkness which once searched for me never found them. Because if one soul had to carry this burden, I prayed, I hoped, I wished with everything in me, that it would always be mine, and never theirs.