Love, Practiced Carefully

In New York City, love is loud. Survival is louder.

Sky became a mother before she ever learned how to be a woman. Nineteen, broke, and alone, she raises her son in the narrow spaces of Queens apartments and double shifts, loving him the only way she knows how: openly, endlessly, without armor. Her hands are always reaching, her voice always soft, her heart always exposed.

Evan grows up watching the world give other boys what he never had. Fathers. Money. Ease. He learns early that love doesn’t pay rent, and tenderness doesn’t keep the lights on. By seventeen, he is sharp-edged and cold, a boy who mistakes survival for strength and shame for independence. His mother’s affection feels like weakness. Her sacrifices feel like failure. Her love feels humiliating.

Sky takes every insult quietly.
Evan throws his pain at the only person who won’t leave.

Their story unfolds in alternating voices, tracing the slow erosion of a bond that once felt unbreakable. Missed school events. Food thrown away. Lies told easily. Nights Sky works through sickness and injury, believing that if she just loves harder, louder, longer, her son will someday understand.

But some understanding comes too late.

As Evan rises out of poverty and into power, becoming everything he once thought would save him, Sky’s body begins to fail under the weight of everything she carried alone. In the end, love is not enough to keep her alive.

Love, Practiced Carefully is a bleak, intimate tragedy about motherhood, resentment, and the quiet violence of survival. It asks what happens when love is real, but timing is cruel — and whether forgiveness matters when the person who needed it most is already gone.

All the time. Because it's easier than feeling. Because truth makes me soft. Because she's already soft enough for the both of us.


I lie to my teachers. "My dad couldn't make it."


I lie to my friends. "We moved because of work."


Lies are armor. Truth is a weapon I don't know how to wield.


This afternoon, I hear her humming from the kitchen. Soft, careful, like she's trying not to disturb anyone. I shove my backpack onto the couch and roll my eyes.


"What's wrong with you?" she asks gently, walking over.


She smiles anyway. "Did you eat lunch?"


I shake my head. Lie. "Yeah, at school."


I see her glance at the empty wrapper on the counter—she knows. She always knows. But she doesn't scold. Doesn't yell. Doesn't force.


Because my lies don't hurt her the way truth would. They hurt me. They make me feel powerless in a way she never has to feel. They make me complicit in a world she already built for me, a world of sacrifice and exhaustion and love I don't deserve.


I want to tell her. I want to confess. I want to say, I see everything, and I hate it, and I love you anyway.


I lie to everyone. I lie to myself. I lie to her.


And every lie makes her work harder, love louder, sacrifice deeper.


Hate it because it reminds me that I can't save her. Can't protect her. Can't fix this life she built for us both.


Because pain isn't enough to make her stop loving me.


Chapter 12 - Lies I Told Easily