The Echoes That Stay

I carry a house of shattered mirrors, each pane reflecting a time I could not leave. Memory does not sit quietly in me it claws at the walls, it drips through the ceiling at night, it rattles the locks when I try to rest. Complex, they call it as if trauma braided itself into a rope, knotted tight around my lungs, woven through the sinews of my past until even my skin does not feel like mine. I live with ghosts that don’t believe they’re dead. They whisper in my ears when no one is near, they push my body into fight, into flight, into freeze long before danger arrives. My nerves still sprint through burning fields while my feet stand still. Love feels like glass to me I want to touch it, but it cuts each time I try. Safety is a language I’ve never learned, so silence becomes my mother tongue. And yet inside the wreckage, a small ember smolders. A pulse that refuses to die, a stubborn rhythm in the marrow, a truth beneath all the breaking: I was meant to outlive the ruins. So I gather the fragments, press them to my chest, and whisper to the trembling child within: You are not the wound, you are the survivor and every scar you bear is a map back to yourself.