stuff and things

The silence was a thick, gray wool pulled over her head,

a place where her name went to die and her "no" was swallowed whole.

For so long, her throat was a locked door,

the key tossed into a dark sea,

leaving her to speak in shrugs and downward glances,

praying to be invisible so she wouldn't have to be heard.

​But a voice is not a thing that can be stolen forever,

it is a seed that waits for the rain.

​It started as a hum in the shower, a vibration in her chest,

a small, private truth whispered to the mirror.

I am here. I am still here.

Then came the words that tasted like copper and fire

the jagged ones, the honest ones, the ones that refused to be polite.

She stopped swallowing the stones others gave her to carry and started spitting them back out as sentences.

​She found that when she spoke her own truth, the ground didn't open up to swallow her.

Instead, the air became easier to breathe.

The power shifted from the hands that hurt

to the mouth that tells the story.

​Now, her voice is not a plea or a whisper.

It is a bell ringing in a clear, cold morning.

It is the sound of a border being drawn in the sand.

It is the "I" and the "am" and the "enough."

​She is no longer a character in a tragedy written by a shadow.

She is the narrator. She is the witness.

And when she speaks, the world has no choice but to listen to the sound of a girl