"Unspoken Cartography"

I smile from behind my morning coffee,

offer you the easy answer—“I’m fine”—

that glitters like the surface of a polished coin,

while continents inside me tilt and submerge,

an entire geography trembling

where your eyes cannot reach.

My mind is charted in invisible ink:

abandoned highways, towns erased by regret,

a country of what-ifs where the traffic lights

are always yellow;

the weight of all my unspoken

held beneath the gloss of small talk.

I am tired—not in bones or muscles—

but in the marrow of the heart,

where hope has calloused over

from carrying dreams too delicate for daylight.

I am afraid—not of dark corners or monsters,

but of a quiet, grinding erosion—

that who I am might fade inside the everyday,

that my wildest, hungriest parts

will be lost in polite silence.

I have swallowed every “no”

that should have been a lightning bolt—

anger simmering beneath the surface,

a cold magma remembering

how many times I bent so the room would not break.

Some days I want to open my mouth

and let out a sound—not animal or thunder,

but the sharp fissure in porcelain,

the question trembling on a single note—

Does anyone notice the fracture?

Does anyone want to see the map behind the mask?

In that deep, glazed silence

I cradle a tenderness I cannot say aloud—

a love so thin, so luminous,

it would evaporate in speech.

The sacred root of my longing,

swaddled and hidden from the world’s static.

So I trace it here—

words spilled on paper like spilled light—

scattered stars that no one else may read,

but unmistakably, beautifully real.

Here, in the hush between lines,

I let my truths breathe.

And even if they never echo in the air between us—

here, at last,

they exist.