AIO-I've had it with life

I wish I could just disappear. Some days, I feel like I already have. Like I’m a ghost haunting the ruins of the life I built—unseen, unheard, and unwanted.

My only son is dead. He was 15. And there’s nothing left in me but fragments of who I used to be.

Since losing him, everything else has unraveled. I found out my second husband had been doing drugs and gambling for two years behind my back. When I confronted the truth, his best friend—who also happened to be our landlord—banned me from the property. Not for lying. For telling the truth. For daring to say out loud that I was being failed. So they threw me out like I was the problem.

I’m 39 years old, worse off than a widow, and back in my childhood bedroom… the one that later became my son’s. I sleep in my dead child’s bed.

My bank account is in the red. I work for myself, but I can’t focus, I can’t create, I can’t even remember what joy feels like.

I keep asking God if He’s punishing me. I don’t know what I did to deserve this kind of sorrow, this kind of exile. I live in ground zero of Hurricane Helene’s path, surrounded by broken trees and mudslides, like the outside of my world finally matches the inside. Everything collapsed. Everything is ruined.

My first ex-husband’s family—God help me—has tried to erase me from Aidan’s legacy. They even put up a second headstone on his grave, leaving my name off entirely, like he was fathered by a ghost and born of stone. As if I didn’t carry him. As if I didn’t birth him, raise him, and bury him.

People I loved turned on me. People I supported, encouraged, built up—they disappeared. Now the only time my phone rings is when someone needs me to fix something.

I’ve given away my skills, my time, my creativity—photography, writing, website design, marketing—all because I believed in people. I believed in love. But now that I’m the one who’s fallen?

No one even remembers I’m alive.

I tried to be good. I tried to live with kindness and honesty. But it didn’t save me. It didn’t protect my child. It didn’t keep my home intact or my marriage from rotting.

Now here I am. Alone. Broke. Sleeping in my son’s bed, begging God for one shred of mercy.

I’m not writing this for attention. I’m writing it because I need to know if anyone out there can still hear me. If my voice can still be heard above the silence. If I still exist to someone, somewhere.

Because I can’t keep walking through this valley unseen. Not anymore.