Author’s Note

This piece is the closest I’ve come to writing the truth of my internal war without softening it. Between Worlds is about self-violence—the way the mind learns your weak spots, remembers the old wounds, and knows exactly where to cut. It’s a poem about relapse, about memory, about survival, and about the strange loneliness that follows healing.

It speaks to the years where I wasn’t sure I’d make it. The hospital walls. The padded quiet. The fluorescent lights humming through the silence. It speaks to dissociation, to identity, to queerness, and to the mythic distance I’ve always felt between who I am and the world I live in.

This poem isn’t a cry for help—it’s a record of survival. It isn’t tragedy for tragedy’s sake—it’s truth. It’s the reality that healing isn’t linear, that progress has shadows, and that sometimes the loudest battles are fought in the mind no one else can see.

If you know this feeling—of standing in your own skin like it never quite fits, of fighting thoughts with thoughts, of loving your existence even when you question your place in it—then I hope you feel seen here.

Because none of us are alone in the in-between.

— Rowan Evans

Between Worlds
Poetry by Rowan Evans

Why do I
always try
to pick a fight
with me?

You’d think I’d know,
by now, just how
quick I’ll slip
an insult
under the ribs.

I’ll hit
every single fear,
twist them
like a knife—
until I’m
on my knees,
gasping,
spitting blood.

I don’t fight fair.
I target old wounds,
tear at what’s
already healed.
I’ll fuck around
and send myself
back ten years—
back to hospital walls
and quiet rooms,
where the only sound
was the fluorescent hum.

Where time dissolved…
where clocks stopped
ticking.

But I walked out
of those halls—
didn’t I?

Didn’t I?

But what if I didn’t?
What if I’m still locked inside,
in a padded room
with the jacket
strapped tight?
Thoughts confined,
so the words
won’t escape.

Writing poems
in my head,
just to pass
the time.

I’ve been alive,
but dead inside.
And I’ll be honest:
I’ve died
inside my mind
more than
a dozen times.

I just wanted escape.

Escape from pain,
from feeling misplaced—
I just wanted
to belong.

But it’s like—
something is wrong here.
Why don’t I
feel like
I belong here?

Why does everything feel
a half inch to the left—
like I’m living inside
the echo of myself?

Like I’m watching my life
from behind fogged glass,
palms against the surface,
screaming—
but no sound
passes through.

Sometimes I swear
the world forgets I’m here,
and sometimes
I do too.

Maybe it’s because
every room I walk into,
I’m half a ghost already—
too queer, too quiet,
too soft, too strange.
Too fucking much
for everyone
but me.

Maybe that’s why
the fight never ends—
because I’m still trying
to prove I deserve
the space I take up,
even in my own skin.

So maybe I don’t belong here
because I was born
between worlds—
not alive, not dead,
not human, not myth,
not safe, not ruined.

Maybe my bones remember
a home I never had,
and every heartbeat since
has been an attempt
to map
my way back.

If you’re looking for more poetry, you can find it here → [The Library of Ashes]