I Just Kind Of Stopped
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
I didn’t shatter.
That would have been cleaner.
Easier to explain.
I just kind of stopped.
Not only my heart—
my self.
My momentum.
My reaching.
The part of me that believed
forward was guaranteed.
They didn’t merely break me.
They dismantled me.
And when I fell—
when every system went quiet—
the vultures arrived.
They always do.
Not scavengers after a death,
but the harbingers of it.
They circled before I hit the ground,
already tasting the ending,
already rehearsing their victory cries.
Claws hooked into what was left of me.
Curved beaks plucked at soft places—
eyes,
voice,
reputation,
truth.
They cawed their joy
as they tore and tore and tore—
revelled in the gore of it,
the ripping,
the harassment,
the lies layered thick as rot.
They backed me against walls
made of their own corruption—
evil pressed close,
greasy with self-centredness—
all of it in service
of hiding what they had done.
This was never about me.
It was about silencing the one
who named the swamp.
Because I was proof.
Proof they didn’t have to stay
rooted in the murk.
Proof they didn’t have to become
the stench of decomposition.
Proof that another life
was possible—
if they were willing
to do the work.
But work has never been their language.
If it doesn’t come easy,
it doesn’t come at all.
So they chose this.
They chose to let evil roll through them
unchecked.
They chose not to be a stopping point,
but a delivery system.
And my existence—
my words,
my love,
my way of radiating truth—
was unbearable to them.
Because it said:
You could have been different.
So they tried to kill me.
They fed on me.
Picked me clean.
Celebrated the silence they thought
they had earned.
What the vultures never understand
is what comes after the stopping.
Stopping is not surrender.
Stopping is containment.
Stopping is the moment
the truth-teller steps out of reach.
They cannot touch me anymore.
And what they wanted most—
the evisceration of my soul,
the erasure of my truth—
is exactly what failed.
Because in stopping,
I slipped the noose.
I left the ground
they poisoned.
They thought they devoured me.
They only cut me loose.
I am not broken.
I am unburdened.
I am free.
I am flying.
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