What I Never Said Out Loud

Content Warning: This story contains references to emotional trauma and mental health struggles that may be triggering for some readers. Please proceed with care.

It started on an autumn afternoon that looked too peaceful to contain what it carried. The light was soft, golden, slipping through the blinds like an apology I didn’t ask for. I remember the silence. That’s the part no one ever talks about—the before. Not the shouting or the breaking or the walking out. Just that awful, awful stillness. The kind that vibrates under your skin and makes your lungs forget how to do their job.

He didn’t raise his voice. Not once. He didn’t have to. He spoke in the kind of tone that strips the words of their surface and drives them straight into your bones. When people ask if I was abused, I never know what to say. Because nothing visible happened. No bruises. No broken furniture. No screaming neighbors. Just the slow erosion of who I was—every day, a little less.

Some wounds don’t show up on skin. They settle in the chest, in the back of the throat, in the way you flinch when someone uses the same phrase he used: “Don’t be so dramatic.”
Every time I heard that, I folded a little more inward.

I was nineteen. And I thought that being chosen by someone older meant I was special. That his attention was a kind of rescue, not a red flag. I mistook control for care. I called it love when he checked my messages, love when he corrected my laugh, love when he stared too long at my clothes before we left the house. I thought discomfort was part of the deal. I thought being loved meant being quiet.



Years passed before I said any of it out loud. By then, I had new clothes, a new city, a carefully reconstructed life full of stable people and predictable mornings. But sometimes I still woke up with the sensation of being watched. Not literally—just that soul-memory that some part of me was still under surveillance. Like healing is a thing you can decorate but never fully inhabit.

I lost friends during that time, not because I wanted to, but because I kept making excuses for him. I’d cancel plans. Ghost texts. Lie without knowing I was lying. That’s what people like him teach you to do: bend. Soften. Disappear. Until you’re a mirror reflecting their need to feel powerful.

I hate mirrors now.

The first time I wrote about him, my hands shook. I didn’t even write his name. Just "H." That was enough. The page didn’t judge me for hesitating. It just waited.

The problem with stories like mine is that they don’t have a proper climax. There was no dramatic ending. I didn’t run out in the rain or scream on a rooftop. I just stopped answering. Blocked him one day and never looked back. But my body remembered him longer than my contacts list did.

Even now, in stable love, in safe arms, I still sometimes pause before speaking. Still sometimes wonder if what I’m about to say is “too much.” That phrase lived in our apartment, in the kitchen drawer next to dull knives and unopened mail. It became part of my bloodstream.

I wish someone had told me earlier that you don’t need to justify leaving someone who quietly destroys you. That "not being hit" isn’t the same as being safe. That gaslighting doesn’t always scream; sometimes, it sighs.

I wish I had written about this sooner. Maybe someone else would’ve recognized their own bruiseless pain. Maybe I would’ve too.

And yet, here I am, writing it now. Not as revenge. Not as confession. But as reclamation.

Because even though I didn’t say it out loud then, I can say it now.

You were wrong.

And I am not too much.

I was never too much.



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