A Ravens heart

There’s a raven inside my chest. Not perched. Not free. Just pacing in circles— wings dragging across the bars of a cage no one else believes is there. I can hear it at night, clawing at my ribs, croaking broken lullabies, songs too heavy for daylight to carry. It remembers the sky— God, it remembers the sky— but memory is a curse when your wings only know walls. The cage isn’t steel, it’s silence, it’s weight, it’s the kind of shadow that follows you even in the dark. Every beat of my heart is another lock snapping shut, another reminder: this bird will not leave. And sometimes— sometimes I don’t know if I’m the one keeping the raven trapped, or if the raven is the one keeping me.