pensamientos

Eleven, was when I first gave language to a desolation that had long lived nameless within me. Nothing remarkable had occurred that night, yet a heaviness settled within me so deeply that, for the first time, I begged and begged God to let sleep keep me. And though years have gathered between then and now, that prayer has never truly left my tongue. It lingers still, soft and bitter, like a hymn my soul cannot forget.

I would not surrender myself, but I learned, with quiet devotion, the art of undoing myself in secret, hollowing gently from within while adorning the surface with beauty and light. It is a habit I have carried into womanhood. I become most radiant in the seasons I am most ruined. I wear elegance like armour, I polish my grief until it gleams.

And the world, so easily dazzled by what shines, does not listen for the hollow echo beneath the gold. No one questions the brilliance of a trophy set high upon a shelf, no one wonders whether, beneath its luster, it is empty, aching and quietly rotting from the inside out. 

It’s not that emptiness visits with sorrow, but that it lingers even in joy. Every time I wake, I am grateful, yet it never arrives alone. I’m accompanied by a grief I cannot name, a quiet mourning of my own existence.