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.

When my mom hugs me, it pulls something loose in my chest that I don't know how to put back. Something weak. Something exposed. Something that doesn't survive well in the world I'm trying to build for myself.


She reaches for me in the hallway that night, fingers brushing my arm as she passes.


"Careful," she says softly. "Your shoulder—"


The words come out sharp enough to echo.


"I said don't," I repeat. Louder this time. "Why do you always have to do that?"


Her hand drops. Her eyes flicker. Hurt, quick and raw, before she smooths it away like she always does.


I go to my room and slam the door because if I don't, I might turn around. And if I turn around, I might let her hold me. And if I let her hold me, I'll break.


I pace my room instead. Run my hands through my hair. Breathe like I'm trying not to drown.


I remember being eight and scraping my knee so bad I thought I'd die. I remember her picking me up, blood and all, holding me so tight I couldn't breathe and whispering, "I've got you, baby. I've got you."


Believing her means admitting I still need her. That I can't do this alone. That all my anger is just fear in a different shape.


Later that night, I hear her moving around the kitchen. Cabinets opening. Closing. The low hum she makes when she's tired and trying not to cry.


Because if I let myself hear her fully, I'll remember the warmth of her arms. The way she smells like soap and home. The way she always knows when I'm hurting, even when I don't say a word.


So tomorrow, when she reaches for me again—and she will—I'll pull away again.


I'll say the words that hurt her before she can hurt me.


Even though part of me is screaming for her to do exactly that.


Chapter 6 - Don’t Touch Me