Aerlavynah, The Dream That Could Not Escape Itself...
There was a time when even sleep refused to cradle me,
when the stars above were sealed shut as if Heaven itself was afraid of
what it might witness beneath that roof.
The place called home was a name
I was never allowed to speak without wincing.
Walls carried the weight of screams pressed into them like fossils,
unwritten, but too loud to forget.
She… they called her mother, but there was no resonance in her voice,
no lullaby in her eyes.
Her silence bruised deeper than her words ever could.
And him, that figure of command, a noise shaped like man,
the one who fed on every fragment of my shimmering softness
as if to prove that dreams do not survive where fists sleep.
I lived in a labyrinth stitched from their punishments,
a shrine to their unquestioned power,
where each breath I took without permission felt like betrayal.
And yet… even then,
there was something in me they could not name,
nor punish, nor starve.
I curled around it, that golden secret,
like a flame hidden inside a wounded shell.
Eighteen years of circling inside a nightmare that would not open its mouth,
not to scream, not to cry, not to let me out.
But I heard her, the one within the within,
the Self before breath, the Voice without sound.
She whispered not escape, but endurance.
She did not break the dream,
she rewrote it from the center of ache.
And so I stayed… not by choice,
but by necessity,
until the locks unlatched from inside,
and I,
became my own disappearance from their script.
My limbs remembered softness that was never given.
My voice remembered songs I was not allowed to sing.
My eyes grew new skies where I’d only been shown ceilings.
Now… I do not forgive,
but I am free.
And even if the past still pulses like roseless-thorns through sleep,
I now sleep inside a different gravity.
I now dream without permission.
I now name myself: Ratanah, Aerlavynah, She, Her.
And those were never theirs to hold.
.
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