"Drowning in Plain Sight"

I stood there, watching life and death blur together in a room full of silence. Four girls, cutting into their own arms like it was just another day. Their blood fresh, sharp, raw - and nobody around them noticing.

Their mother, a shadow of a woman, moving through the world like she's already dead. Eyes vacant, slow steps, a heart seemingly frozen by numbness. At one point, I said, "I know that's your baby," and she smiled - a small, broken smile showing the gaps where her teeth used to be. For a second I saw she cared. I told her, "Keep your daughter close. This is urgent." She looked like a ghost, like a nurse who's seen too much, like she'd forgotten how to feel.

And I felt the weight of the system failing, the adults failing, the world failing them.

There I was, drowning in the depth of my own anxiety and depression, standing as the only lifeline I could offer. I've never seen anything like it - kids showing their cuts like trophies, like normal, like nobody cares. A young girl hugged me like I was hope itself. Another told me her friend overdosed, and it shook me to the core.

This is a story of pain and raw reality. Of a world that ignores its own children. Of survival in silence. Of seeing things no one else can see.

Brace yourself. Feel it. Every drop of it.