Aftermath
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
There was a before.
Of course there was.
There is always a before
to things that split a life in two.
It did not feel fragile at the time.
It felt like living—
open-handed,
unarmoured,
certain that the world
would meet me as I was.
I moved through it easily then.
Unaware
of the ways a moment
could rearrange everything
that came after it.
I did not know
how quickly a life
could be divided
into what was
and what could never be again.
—
After
does not arrive gently.
It does not announce itself
with clarity or warning.
It comes like a fracture—
sudden,
decisive,
impossible to ignore
once it has taken hold.
And just like that,
there are two versions of you.
The one who existed
without knowing.
And the one who knows.
—
I look back sometimes
at who I was before
and it feels like remembering
someone else’s life.
Someone softer.
Someone who did not measure rooms
for exits
or conversations
for danger.
Someone who believed
that people meant what they said
and said what they meant.
Someone who did not understand
how easily trust
could be turned
into something else entirely.
I want to reach for them.
Warn them.
Tell them—
but there is no language
for what they have not yet lived.
—
After,
everything hardens.
Not all at once.
Not in ways that are obvious
to anyone else.
But slowly—
soft becomes guarded.
Tender becomes careful.
Open becomes measured.
And fear—
fear becomes a quiet companion
that learns how to pass
for instinct.
I became someone
I never intended to be.
Stronger, they might say.
Resilient.
As though those words
were not built
on something taken.
As though I chose this.
As though I would have chosen this.
—
There is an unfairness to it
that never quite settles.
The way something done to you
becomes something you must carry.
The way it reshapes you
while the one who shaped it
continues—
unchanged,
unburdened,
moving through other lives
as though nothing has happened at all.
As though nothing is happening still.
—
And yet—
I am here.
Not as I was.
Not untouched.
Not whole in the same way.
But here.
Living in the after
of something
I did not choose
and could not stop.
Learning, slowly,
that survival
is not the same
as consent.
That becoming
is not always a choice—
but it is still a becoming.
—
There was a before.
There is an after.
And somewhere between them
is the quiet, impossible truth
that I am both—
the one who did not know
and the one who does—
trying, still,
to understand
how to live
as someone
who remembers both.
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Poetry by Britt Wolfe:
This piece explores the quiet but irreversible moment when a life is divided into before and after—not by choice, but by something done to you that you were never meant to carry. It is about the disorientation of remembering who you were before you knew, and the stark, often unrecognizable person you become after. There is a particular kind of unfairness in being reshaped by harm while the source of it continues on, untouched, elsewhere. And yet, within that fracture, there is also a truth that refuses to be erased: that even in the aftermath of something you did not choose, you are still here, still becoming, still learning how to live with both versions of yourself at once. 🖤