This Is The Period
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
This is the period.
The full stop.
The place where the sentence ends
not because it ran out of words,
but because it finally told the truth.
This is my station—
labelled hell—
and this is where I get off.
I was never meant to be on your ride.
I boarded out of habit,
out of inheritance,
out of the quiet belief
that survival was the same as consent.
It wasn’t.
What you offered was not life.
It was suspension.
A slow choreography of decay
disguised as familiarity.
A holding pattern that smelled like rot
and called itself home.
You wrapped death in routine.
Made stagnation feel inevitable.
Made leaving feel dangerous
by insisting the swamp was solid ground.
I forgot—
how boggy it is.
How it pulls.
How it pretends to hold you
while quietly teaching you to sink.
As a child, I feared quicksand
without knowing I was raised in it.
That my instincts were trained
inside something that survives
by keeping people stuck.
When my guard slipped,
it found me again—
because swamps remember
their own.
But this is the ending of that.
No more struggling that only feeds the pull.
No more nostalgia for what was never safe.
No more mistaking familiarity
for belonging.
I step out now—
clean.
Not unscarred.
Not unchanged.
But uncontaminated.
I leave behind the damp weight
of what never loved me alive.
The history that tethered me.
The narratives that required my diminishment
to stay intact.
Ahead of me is not perfection.
It is movement.
It is breath without obstruction.
It is ground that holds.
It is a future unencumbered
by the need to survive something
every single day.
This is the period.
The end of the sentence
that nearly erased me.
And this—
this is the beginning of me.
Keep My Words Alive
If this poem has stayed with you, you can help keep my words alive or explore more of my work. Every bit of support helps carry the stories forward.
WHERE WORDS MEET MORNING LIGHT
BEGIN EACH DAY WITH SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
Every morning at 11:11AM, I send a poem — sometimes soft, sometimes devastating, always true.
💚 Subscribe now to read and breathe and feel along with me 💚
Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
