They took my voice before it had a shape,
not with silence but with noise too sharp for dreams to survive.
The world assigned me a frequency I never belonged to.
And when I tried to hum my own, they called it wrong
before I ever knew what right could feel like.
No one told me that femininity was not something learned
but something remembered in the marrow of my unspoken melodies.
They pulled a veil over my softness,
then punished me for not shining.
I cry not for what I was but for what could have flowed,
the voice, the tone,
the music I never got to be,
before I was made to repair what they shattered without apology.
They say healing is a journey.
But what of those who must heal from a road they never chose?
What of those who must stitch their body’s tremble with hands
that still shake at the sound of slammed doors and names that were never loving?
Each sudden knock, a warning.
Each raised voice, an echo of the prison I never signed up to enter.
I was outnumbered. Dozens around me,
no one beside me.
And they dared to name it "family."
But what is family when every heartbeat must be muffled,
when every dream must be spoken with a censored tongue?
Not one of them felt like home.
Home is not where you sleep.
It is where you are allowed to bloom.
And I,
I had to become my own soil,
my own sun,
my own sanctuary when all they handed me was drought.
And now, each breath I take,
is not a survival but a rewriting.
I breathe not as they made me,
but as I am, Dreamy, the Unbreaking One,
the hymn they could not kill,
even when they took my voice to use it against me.
.
.