Silence Cannot Swallow

There are places inside me where the air still tastes like mud and rust, where the silence is thick enough to choke on. I don’t talk about them. People like their survival stories clean, wrapped up with light and redemption. But mine is not clean. Mine is tar and blood and broken glass under my feet. There were years I couldn’t tell if I was alive or just… refusing to die. Nights where the darkness pressed its hands around my throat and whispered that I didn’t matter, that I was already gone. And maybe I was, for a while. Maybe I disappeared into myself just to stop feeling everything burning me alive.

I remember the weight of the bog, the way it tried to pull me under, how cold it was down there. It’s quiet when you’re buried like that, but it isn’t peace. It’s a slow drowning, the kind where no one hears you. You stop fighting after a while because exhaustion feels kinder than clawing. But somewhere deep inside me, deeper than the silence, deeper than the grief, there was something wild and unrelenting that refused to give in. I didn’t rise with grace; I rose ugly, feral, teeth bared, dragging myself out of pits that wanted to keep me. My nails tore. My lungs burned. My body carried bruises no one could see. Survival wasn’t a choice. It was instinct.

People think healing is soft. They think survival comes with tidy metaphors and sunrises. They don’t talk about the pieces of yourself you have to bury just to keep breathing. The parts you have to kill to keep living. I’ve left bones of myself scattered in the shadows of places I never wanted to be. Some of them still whisper when I pass too close. I had to drown entire versions of myself, burn bridges behind me, and stitch my ribs back together with fire and grit just to walk forward again. That kind of rebuilding leaves you raw. It leaves you different. It leaves you knowing you will never, ever be the same.

And yet, I carry light, too. Not because it was handed to me, but because I stole it back, piece by bloody piece. I found it in the smallest fragments: in the quiet after breaking, in the smell of earth after rain, in the poems I scratched into notebooks when my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I learned to make beauty out of wreckage, to carve something holy out of the shattered things. My survival isn’t delicate... it’s jagged and loud, like hooves pounding across open ground. My life is my stampede, my proof, my rebellion. Every creation I touch -- the scents, the jewelry, the art, the words.. is me carving my name into the bones of a world that tried to erase me.

I am not gentle anymore. I am not fragile. I carry the tar and the light. I carry the scars and the fire. I have walked through every pit meant to swallow me and left claw marks behind so the darkness remembers me, too. I do not move softly now. I move like thunder rolling through the mountains, like rivers cutting through rock, like someone who refuses to be forgotten. I am not just surviving. I am becoming something the silence cannot swallow.

I am still here.

And the ground knows my name.