Not in a coffin, nor in a grave but beneath the folds of expectation,
under the ribbons of performance.
She was placed in a lull of shoulds,
knotted into the fabric of what breath was permitted in a world that never knew
how to kneel before softness.
She was not lost,
they simply never arrived at the place where she bloomed.
And so, she bloomed inward.
Where others offered noise,
she offered hush.
Where they offered flame,
she became the ocean whose grief evaporated before it was seen.
There, beneath a thousand silences stitched by duty and denial,
the echoes of her laughter grew wild,
inside the chambers of a heart no longer allowed to be a heart.
What was buried grew roots in the Unspoken,
blossomed through the unseen pores of her skin.
They could not feel what she withheld,
a kind of miracle so contained, so precious,
it bruised Time to speak it aloud.
The tide came for her once, but she turned away,
not to run, but to stay still long enough to become a tide of her own.
And even now, in places where sorrow cannot be named,
there is a pulsing… a warmth that lingers
in the soil of every buried truth.
She is not where they placed her.
She is where no hands can reach,
where heartbeat is a language of stars,
where forgetting becomes the last veil before her remembrance finds
its voice.