How Jealousy Quietly Ruined Me

Like a slow poison that kills your inner world.

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I sit far from him, close enough to see the way his eyes crease when he laughs. He is talking to her. Fully. Easily. As if the rest of the room has dissolved.

She is beautiful in a way that feels deliberate. Elegant. Effortless. She belongs there, in the space I keep imagining as mine.

Something ignites inside me. A slow burn at first, then louder. My chest tightens. My fingers curl into my palms. Every part of me wants to stand up and claim the empty air between them, to pull his attention back like it was misplaced property.

Anxiety arrives quietly, then mutates. It sharpens. He laughs again, and the heat in my body spikes. My heartbeat grows reckless. My thoughts lose their edges. I don’t hate her, not really. I hate that she has what I crave.

This feeling is familiar.

I remember being six. Old enough to notice the silence where I used to be. My mother holding my newborn brother, her voice softer, her eyes fuller. I stood there, unseen, watching him take up the space that once belonged to me. I didn’t have words for it then, but I remember the certainty. That is my place.

It followed me as I grew. When cousins visited and my father laughed too loudly with them. When friends leaned toward someone else in school. When attention drifted away from me like it had a choice.

Once, I shouted at a girl, told her to leave my best friend alone. I used words I wasn’t supposed to know yet. My parents were called. The principal’s office smelled like disappointment and furniture polish.

With my brother, it was worse. I didn’t know how to be a sister when every smile he received felt like theft. I watched relatives dote on him, my jaw clenched, my hands useless at my sides.

As I grew older, tantrums became unacceptable. So I learned restraint. I learned how to still my face, how to smile at the right moments, how to swallow the scream before it reached my throat. I became careful. Controlled.

Too controlled.

Some people noticed. Some exploited it. Others were oblivious, mistaking my silence for maturity. I became very good at pretending nothing hurt, very good at wanting without reaching.

Now, I sit here again, watching him give her the attention I ache for. I don’t move. I don’t speak. I don’t claim what feels like mine.

I just sit, perfectly composed, performing a role I have mastered.

And inside me, the fire burns quietly, waiting.