Silence That Lives In My Bones

They called it necessary.

Life-saving,

they said I was lucky.

I was reminded of how I should be grateful for the chance to live.

But the doctors didn’t tell me what else would die in the operating room.

They failed to mention,

how they’d take the illness

and with it, my womb, my chance, my womanhood as I knew it.

They didn’t warn me about the silence that follows this type of procedure.

The kind of silence that settles in your bones when your body is no longer home,

just aftermath.

I was too young to hear the word hysterectomy spoken like a calling,

too young to lose something I hadn’t even used yet.

I was too young,

to grieve children who would never call me mother.

My belly healed in stitches, but the ache never left.

Some nights,

my hands press to the scar like I’m trying to remember something that was mine before it was cut away.

Nobody talks about the shame, or

the way people shift with pity curled behind their eyes when you say “I can’t have children.”

Or worse,

the questions,

as if my worth was a uterus they expected me to fight for.

And I did.

Shit, I fought.

I fought through appointments,

through the endless scans,

the cold metal tables,

the word cancer wrapped in white coats and forced smiles.

I fought for air when grief sat on my chest.

I fought for joy when the mirror said I was broken.

I was angry,

so angry,

not just at the sickness, but at the betrayal of my own body, of time, of biology.

I was angry at the dream of holding someone who looked like me,

of singing lullabies to a child who’d never come.

I was angry that no one prepared me for how empty survival can feel.

They don’t write about this kind of grief.

The one where you’re alive but mourning the version of yourself that never got to exist.

Still, I rise each morning.

Not because I’m brave.

But because this grief has carved out a place inside me that holds light as fiercely as it holds sorrow.

I laugh.

Not always easily, but earnestly.

Because I know what it means to lose everything and still find breath.

I am still learning how to carry this loss,

how to wear womanhood without a womb.

I am learning,

how to stand tall even with a hollow inside me.

And some days, it still feels like nothing will ever be okay.

But here I am.

Still here.

Still becoming something whole in the aftermath of everything that was taken.