To Be Heard Is To Never Speak A Word

I was born with a voice,

A voice that ripped from my chest in my very first moments,

Between my gasps for the air that I had not yet tasted.

I was born with a certain curiosity,

A certain hunger

For the words that had not yet reached my eyes.

There is something bittersweet

About remembering the warm summer evenings

During which the sweat dripped into my eyes

And my tennis shoes turned the color green.

During the warm summer evenings

I would scream.

I was filled to the brim with love for the world

And I knew every god in every constellation

In every galaxy I had dared to dream up

Would hear my voice

And be pleased.

The fall came soon after

And the air tasted different.

I opened my mouth

And poured my words upon the table before me.

But the fall had brought forth the scavengers,

The monsters from under my bed.

They picked snatched up the words from my mouth

And made them into something new

It’s incredible how there are only twenty-six letters in our alphabet

Yet these twenty-six letters hold so much power

I feared the twisted words the scavengers had left

And I feared every god in every constellation

That I could conjure in my darkest nightmares.

I sat in silence.

I watched years race by in Technicolor

Never once parting my lips

Never once recreating some semblance of the voice

That ripped through my chest

At the very beginning.

When winter came, I sat stock still

And feared the snow because of the scavengers

Because of the monsters that had left my bed

And burrowed in my throat.

With the spring came the thaw

The realization

That I could still be heard.

It’s incredible that in the loudest moments of my life

I do not speak a single word.

I write

Because a pen is a sword

Fitted to my grasp

And sharpened to fight the scavengers,

To defeat my demons that snatched my words.

I write

Because I hate to talk

For my words to become twisted and turned against me.

Because life is not a book

And I never say the right thing,

But I know how to write it.

I write to be heard,

To scream into the silence of my life,

To fight the battles that I can’t fight out loud.

I was born with a voice,

A voice that rips from my fingertips

With the splendor of a thousand suns,

Without having to say a single thing.

 

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