When silence screams

She looks at me as if I arrived uninvited- a shadow crossing her perfect floor, a name spoken with the weight of disdain. In her eyes, I am less, a pause before a sentence she never finishes, a mistake she cannot erase, but refuses to accept. Her words are small knives, wrapped in smiles, served at tables where I am expected to be grateful for the wound. I swallow my voice whole, because screaming would only prove what she already believes- that I am too much, too loud, too wrong. So I shrink. I learn the language of tight jaws and lowered eyes, the art of surviving rooms where respect never learned my name. Inside me, a storm beats its fists against my ribs. I want to run- not away from her, but back to the version of me that didn't question her worth because of someone else's cruelty. I dream of doors slamming, of air that doesn't taste like judgement, of freedom that doesn't ask permission to exist.