Glass House

I wake each morning in borrowed skin, a house built wrong but lived in long— plaster over fractures, lipstick on the lies, wrapping softness around bones that betray. The mirror is a blade, not sharp, but relentless— a thousand paper cuts made by shoulders too broad, voice too deep, a name I never asked for echoing like thunder through my own hollow halls. I learned to smile like armour, to speak in careful chords, to float through the world with hips that never swayed right, a laugh always one octave too low for the girl screaming inside. Every step is negotiation— with strangers’ glances, with my own reflection, with the weight of being almost but never quite home. I am not ashamed of her, the woman I am— she is a revolution in a cage of ribs and silence. She is the whisper beneath the roar, the softness that refused to die. One day, she will breathe without apology. She will run— not from the body, but toward herself. And the glass will shatter not from pain, but from sunlight.