The Hollow Tar

There are places I’ve been that no one talks about. Places you don’t come back from the same... if you come back at all. I’ve walked through the pits where silence is heavy and cruel, where tar clings to your lungs until breathing feels like betrayal. I’ve sunk into bogs so deep the sun disappeared, and I thought maybe this was it.. this was where I’d stay buried. These places don’t care about your name, your faith, or your fight. They want you hollow, erased, a ghost no one remembers. And for a long time, I thought they’d have me.

But something in me wouldn’t die. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t a sweet kind of hope or soft whispers about tomorrow. It was raw, animal, desperate.. the wildness of a creature cornered, blood in its teeth, refusing to go under. A spark lived in me, so small I could have missed it, and yet it roared louder than the silence. I didn’t save myself by floating up toward the light. I clawed. I bled. I tore pieces of myself away to rise again. That’s what

survival looked like. It wasn’t beautiful. It was violent. It was necessary.

There were hands that harmed me, words that sliced, nights that swallowed me whole. I’ve buried versions of myself that will never breathe again, laid them to rest beneath dirt I never asked to walk on. Some days, I still feel their weight pressing down, reminding me of everything I had to lose just to keep going. I rebuilt myself from scraps... lungs made of shattered glass, bones stitched together by fire and refusal. And even when they tried to take everything from me, I carried the ember of myself out of that wreckage, hot enough to burn down everything they left behind.

I didn’t just survive. I stamped myself back into existence. Every poem I write, every scent I blend, every stroke of paint and bead of jewelry... they are marks carved into the world, loud and deliberate, proof that I’m still here. My creations are not delicate. They are defiance. They are the footprints of someone who was meant to disappear but chose instead to stampede, to thunder loud enough that no one could forget my name.

Don’t mistake my silence for surrender. Don’t confuse my gentleness with weakness. I’ve stared into the abyss and I’ve let it stare back, and when it tried to claim me, I dragged my name out of its throat and built myself into something unbreakable. I carry the tar. I carry the scars. I carry the weight of every place that tried to keep me buried. And still, I rise, carving myself into this earth so deep that even time won’t erase me.

I am not the pits that swallowed me.

I am not the silence that tried to drown me.

I am the roar after survival.

I am the sound of glass shattering,

a thousand pieces catching the light,

proof that even in the darkest void,

I choose to burn.