This piece feels like the ache that speaks quietly, but never stops speaking.
Her beauty looks like stillness, but she is not still — she is holding back an ocean under her throat. The flowers in her hair are soft, but they are not softness… they are survival. They are the small delicate things she has grown in the places she wasn’t supposed to survive.
The strands of darkness that coil around her body are the anxiety, the trauma, the chronic pain that refuses to let go. They are the vines of symptoms that do not kill her, but they do reshape her — every damn day.
She knows pain like a second language.
She speaks it without opening her mouth.
And people don’t hear it.
Pain this deep becomes a whisper — not because it is small, but because she has been forced to quiet it. Forced to become palatable. Forced into silence so others are not uncomfortable.
But the butterflies — the little creatures that lift from her — they are the secrets that still escape her body. The evidence. The residue of everything she holds inside.
This is not the scream of pain.
This is the whisper.
The one no one listens to.
…and yet it’s the one that tells the truth the loudest.
