Rose Belvedere Lalonde: "Update: still sick. I hate this. Hate the chills, hate cough…"

Hate does not arrive as a storm. It arrives as a spark. A single grievance. A single wound. A single moment where kindness dies and something colder takes its place. At first, it feels powerful. Hate whispers that it can protect you. It tells you that anger is strength and bitterness is wisdom. It convinces you that every scar deserves another scar in return. So you feed it. You give it your patience. You give it your mercy. You give it every piece of yourself that once believed in forgiveness. And hate rewards you by burning your bridges one by one. Friends become enemies. Family becomes strangers. Every helping hand becomes a threat. Every smile becomes a lie. The world shrinks until all that remains is a fortress built from suspicion and resentment. But hate is a hungry thing. No matter how much you give it, it always demands more. Soon there is nobody left to blame. Nobody left to fight. Nobody left to hurt except yourself. That is when the loneliness begins. You sit among the ashes of the connections you destroyed, wondering why nobody calls your name anymore. The silence grows heavier with every passing day. The empty rooms seem larger. The nights become longer. And in that loneliness, fear is born. Fear that everyone truly hates you. Fear that nobody will ever return. Fear that you have become something unrecognizable. Hate promised strength, but delivered isolation. It promised victory, but left only ruins. It promised protection, but chained you to an endless cycle of anger and paranoia. In the end, hate does not destroy its enemies. It destroys its host. It hollows out the soul like fire consuming a house from the inside, leaving only blackened beams and drifting smoke where warmth once lived. And when the flames finally die, you are left standing alone in the darkness, surrounded by the wreckage of every bridge you ever burned, listening to the echo of a life that might have been.