The Things I Never Said Out Loud”

I never told you

what it cost me to laugh.

How I had to dig through a graveyard of grief

and stitch my pain into something pretty

wrap it in sarcasm, lace it in grace

just so you’d still hold space for me.

So I wouldn’t feel like a burden

in rooms already too full of

everyone else’s version of broken.

I never told you

how many nights I swallowed the scream,

chewed it down until it tasted like silence.

Because silence

as cruel as it can be

still felt safer than being misunderstood.

Still felt safer than being labeled

“too much,”

or “too damaged,”

or worse

“attention-seeking.”

I never told you

that touch doesn’t feel like love to me.

It feels like memory.

It feels like being 13 again,

paralyzed in my own skin,

with hands that didn’t ask,

didn’t pause,

didn’t care if I was ready.

It feels like flinching when someone brushes past.

It feels like apologizing for not wanting to be held.

It feels like guilt I never asked to carry.

And I never said this out loud,

but sometimes…

I miss the girl who didn’t survive.

The version of me before the folding.

Before the faking.

Before the faith broke.

She was softer.

More naive, maybe,

but still whole.

Still dreaming.

Still believing there was safety somewhere

outside of herself.

I buried her.

Right next to the poems

I wasn’t brave enough to write,

and the prayers I whispered

to ceilings that never whispered back.

I buried her in conversations

where I nodded and smiled,

when what I really wanted

was to scream,

“This isn’t who I am.

This is who I became

after the fire.”

I never told you

that I flinch when people say

they “love me for my strength.”

As if my trauma is a talent.

As if I volunteered for the pain.

As if becoming strong

was some glorious victory

instead of a slow, bleeding surrender.

No one asks how I got strong.

They just admire the shape of my scars—

trace them with their words,

as if pain polished me into something worthy.

They forget that every scar

was once an open wound,

and every survival story

has pages I still can’t read without shaking.

But let me tell you something.

The girl I used to be?

She’s still here.

Not loud. Not easy to find.

But alive

beneath all this armor,

beneath the laughter that doesn’t always feel real,

beneath the “I’m fine” that feels safer than honesty.

Sometimes she hums songs

I forgot I knew.

Sometimes she peeks out

when the world finally feels quiet.

She exists in the quiet moments,

in the pauses between panic attacks,

in the softness I still struggle to give myself.

She exists in the tears that fall

when no one is watching.

And I didn’t say any of this out loud

not to you, not to anyone.

But it’s true.

It’s all true.

And sometimes,

truth doesn’t need volume.

It doesn’t need a microphone

or a stage

or even a listener.

Sometimes it just needs a home.

A space where it can exhale.

A space where I can exhale.

Where the things I’ve carried for too long

can finally lay down beside me

and rest.

Because I’m tired.

Not of life—

but of pretending I’m not still healing from it.

So if you ever wondered why

I grew quiet when the room got loud,

or why I look away when someone says “I love you,”

know this:

It’s not because I don’t want to believe them.

It’s because part of me

still remembers

what it felt like

to not be believed

at all.