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.

No. Not hate. That's too simple. Too childish. Too polite.


I resent her. I'm angry at her. I despise everything she represents: love I didn't ask for, sacrifice I didn't want, softness I don't know how to hold without feeling weak.


And yet… I can't stop thinking about her.


The words spill out before I can control them. "You always—always—do too much. You think love fixes everything. It doesn't. It makes things worse."


Her eyes blink, a quiet hurt, and I swear it makes me want to vomit.


"I never meant it like that," I say, instantly, because my anger isn't supposed to hurt her. It's supposed to protect me from… feeling. Feeling that I should be grateful, that I should be embarrassed, that I should love her back.


But she doesn't step away. Doesn't cry. Doesn't yell. She just… looks at me. Waits.


I hate her patience. Hate her quiet endurance. Hate that she keeps loving me when I make it impossible.


I pace the room. Hands clench into fists. "You don't understand," I snap. "You can't."


She only nods. Soft, quiet, like she's already known this. Like she's already lived it. Like she's already forgiven me, even though I don't deserve it.


Her voice cuts me off, calm, unwavering. "I know, baby. I know."


It's supposed to make me stop. It doesn't.


I want to scream. I want to run. I want to hit something. I want to fix it but I don't know how.


I'm a mess wrapped in rage and pride and shame.


I hate that she sees me. The real me. The coward behind the brat.


"I never meant it like that," I repeat, but this time, I don't know if it's for her or me.


Chapter 14 - I Never Meant It Like That