The Things I Could Not Say

There were things I couldn’t say

not because I didn’t want to

but because the words felt like knives and I didn’t know if anyone would catch them without bleeding.

I couldn’t say:

She’s not okay.

I’m not okay.

The house is heavy with things no one wants to name.

I learned early that truth, in the wrong room,

becomes a threat.

Truth in the wrong room becomes

“Are you sure?” Becomes “Don’t talk like that.” Becomes eyes narrowing like a locked door.

So I stopped trying,

I swallowed it all.

I choked on the late nights, the shouting, the missing pieces of a mother who vanished in plain sight.

I held every truth in my chest like smoke I couldn’t exhale

& it burned.

For sure, it burned.

I wanted someone to notice;

to ask, like really ask

not with a clipboard, but with open hands.

Instead, I got “Be grateful.”

“Other kids have it worse.”

“Stop being dramatic.”

So I learned to tuck my fear under my tongue, to smile through stories with holes in them,

to lie kindly for the comfort of others.

There were things I couldn’t say because my silence was more palatable than my pain.

But silence has a weight, and I carried it into every room I entered.

I still do, sometimes.

Even now,

with a mouth full of poems and a life made of all the things I once buried.

I am learning to say them anyway.