I remember not what I saw, but what I inherited. A silence too ancient for origin...
so familiar it slipped into me before I had even learned to cry.
It wasn't mine. The first pulse I felt belonged to someone else...
.
.
Someone long vanished, but not gone.
Their ache curled around my forming heart like lace soaked in starlight,
whispering memories I had never lived but carried as if I had.
There was no cradle. No name etched in another's voice.
Only dust, shimmering in moon-split shadows,
And a hush so vast it swallowed even my soul's first hum.
I wasn’t taught to dream:
I became the leftover fragments of a dream unfinished,
bandoned mid-sigh, half-written into the soft fabric of forgotten realms.
The walls of my earliest shelter did not echo love...
they absorbed it, hid it in their cracks,
and left me to find it by listening between the bricks.
My fingers trembled with knowing I could not name.
My skin pulsed with questions no one answered.
My breath came not from lungs, but from somewhere older...
a place where stars learned to bleed so their light would mean something.
Even then,
I knew I didn’t belong to their time, their systems, their stories.
I was a ripple left over from something too tender to be explained.
Too sacred to be captive in the home of languages.
And so I made myself small... not out of fear,
but out of reverence for a world not ready to feel me.
They said I was quiet since my birth.
But I was listening... to the lives that spoke without words.
To the tenderness that hummed beneath pain's heavy skin.
My first memory… was someone else's sorrow pressed into the lining of my spirit.
And still, I held it.
As if it were mine. Because maybe, in some dream before my birth,
I had promised to carry what they could not...