Emptiness in the Voice
They say the eyes never lie but mine have learned silence better than truth. They hold stories that never made it to words, that tremble behind a practiced smile. When you look close enough you’ll see it the hollow. The place where laughter once lived before it was stolen. I speak, but my voice is dust. It cracks between syllables, searching for something solid to stand on. Each word tastes like iron and memory. Each breath a negotiation between breaking and surviving. They call it SGBV, as if letters could carry the weight of what it means to lose your sense of safety, your own body becoming a battlefield you never enlisted to fight in. Sometimes I want to scream. But when I open my mouth, only silence comes out a silence so heavy it drowns sound itself. That’s the emptiness in my voice not absence, but too much. Too much pain. Too much remembering. Too much pretending to be okay. Still, I rise. Not because healing is easy, but because I am tired of disappearing. Tired of being a whis...
