**Poor Bella Never Grew Up**

There was a girl
who could have been a sunrise,
the kind of beauty
that never needed permission to exist.

But the mirrors multiplied,
and every glowing screen
became another hungry mouth
asking her to trade tomorrow
for one more moment
of being wanted today.

Applause is a dangerous drug
when no one teaches a child
how to survive the silence.

So she learned addiction
the way abandoned hearts often do—
not all at once,
but one empty promise at a time.

Validation became a bottle.
Attention became a needle.
Desire became a currency.
Every stranger's gaze
paid interest
on a debt that could never be repaid.

Her mind remained
where the wounds first found it,
because pain left untreated
rarely grows older—
it simply grows louder.

Somewhere along the road
a child arrived,
small enough
to deserve a different inheritance.

I pray those little hands
find the warmth
that broken hands
could never quite hold.

For children should inherit gardens,
not generations
of unanswered questions.

She spoke often of heaven,
yet wandered deeper
into shadows
that whispered they were light.

She called herself awakened,
while every step
led farther
from the quiet voice within.

The saddest deception
is not fooling the world.

It is convincing yourself
that every mask
is another face.

Years passed.

The seasons changed.
The faces changed.
The platforms changed.

But every time
someone looked for her,
she was standing
in the very same doorway,
singing the very same song,
waiting for strangers
to tell her
she still existed.

Not because she was evil.

Not because she was beyond grace.

But because no one
ever taught her
that love cannot be borrowed
from a crowd.

It must be grown
in the lonely places
where applause cannot reach.

And so the years
kept circling her
like birds that had forgotten
how to migrate.

Beauty faded.

The filters sharpened.

The laughter echoed thinner.

While the frightened little girl
inside the woman
waited for someone
to teach her
what growing up
was supposed to feel like.

Poor Bella.

The tragedy
was never that she grew older.

It was that time
kept moving,

and she never learned
to move with it.