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.

I see her in public, and it's like the world knows.


Her hands are too worn, her clothes too plain. Her smile too desperate. The way she moves screams look at me, notice me, love me anyway, and every eye in the room obliges, because pity wears easier than judgment in New York.


I want to disappear when she touches me, calls me "my heart" like it's supposed to matter. I want to crawl into the floor and pull it over me. I want the ground to swallow me and her love with me.


At lunch with friends, she shows up. She waves, wide-eyed, radiant in her tiredness.


I feel heat in my chest. Not warmth. Shame. Raw, suffocating shame.


I can't look at her. I grip my sandwich like it's a shield.


"She's embarrassing," I mutter. Not loud enough for them. Loud enough for me. Loud enough to keep the truth at bay.


Everywhere we go, people see her. People know she's mine, and they know what that means. That I come from struggle. That I didn't get a father. That I grew up with a mom who works until her bones ache so I could eat. That I am… nothing like them.


I hate that I'm grateful but can't let myself show it.


I hate that her love is loud and public and impossible to hide from.


When we get home, I slam the door and throw my backpack on the floor. She's in the kitchen, smiling like nothing happened, like her love won't burn me alive again.


I say nothing. I don't move. I pretend not to notice her at all.


She exhales and retreats. Always retreats. Because she's learned. She's learned that my shame wears her face.


And maybe someday, too late, I'll realize it wears my face as well.


Chapter 8 - Shame Wears Your Face