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.

It's deep, marrow-deep exhaustion. The kind that sinks into your bones and stays, no matter how many hours you sleep, no matter how many aspirin you take, no matter how much coffee you gulp down in desperation.


My body doesn't feel like mine anymore.


I bend over the counter, scrubbing a stubborn stain off the tile, and feel a sharp twist in my back. I bite my lip to keep from crying out. My hands shake, almost dropping the sponge.


I think about Evan. His sharp jaw, his broad shoulders, his flinches. His words. Don't touch me.Stop calling me that.I hate that you—


I carry groceries upstairs like a mule, my knees screaming with every step. I put away dinner while my stomach knots from skipping lunch again. I move through the apartment, mopping floors, folding laundry, tidying the chaos that I barely have time to survive.


I remember a time when Evan was small enough to fit on my hip. He laughed when I danced around the kitchen while cooking. He believed the world was safe because I was there.


Now he's seventeen, and he believes the world is dangerous because I'm not enough.


My wrist throbs as I stir the soup. My back protests as I lift a chair. My head pounds like a drum in my skull.


I eat less so he eats more. Sleep less so he sleeps more. Work more so he has something. Anything.


I think about the bank statements stacked neatly in my bag. The overdue bills I've hidden from him. The rent I begged extensions on. The nights I cried silently on the bathroom floor so he wouldn't hear.


All of it. Every sacrifice. Every ache. Every lost piece of myself.


I collapse onto the bed later that night. Body burning, muscles screaming. My hands shake as I press them to my face. I taste the tears I didn't want to cry.


I whisper to the empty room, "I'm trying, baby. I'm trying so hard."


And somewhere, deep down, I know he doesn't see it. Doesn't care.


Chapter 13 - My Body Is Not Mine Anymore