The Prismatic Self

I write because silence was a tyrant with a velvet muzzle. Because childhood was a soundproof cage, and I was taught to swallow every scream like communion. “Poetry is not therapy,” the judge says— but he has never been buried alive under the weight of unsaid things. This is not a poem. It is an autopsy where I hold the scalpel and the mirror. Anadiplosis: I write because I wasn’t heard. Wasn’t heard because I was too broken to speak. Too broken to speak, so I taught my wounds to whisper in metre. Litotes: It’s not that I never had a voice— it’s that I had no listeners. Each stanza is a splinter pried from the bones of a girl forgotten by the system, a girl mistaken for a file number, a dosage, a relapse, a risk. I am made of metaphors because truth was never safe naked. I stage my pain on the theatre of the page— not to perform, but to practise resurrection. My life has been a series of auditions before indifferent gods: Family court. Rehab. Recovery. Rejection letters. I walk into each contest like a gladiator into a coliseum of clipped tongues and sharpened pens. Not to win— but to remind the world I survived the audition for my own existence. Conceit: My soul is a prism— fractured, but scattering light in more directions than a whole thing ever could. I invented a word for what I am: Echolucence— the condition of glowing only when echoed, of finding light in the return of your own voice. So ask me again: Why do I write? Because I am still learning to believe that I am not noise. That my voice is a weapon, a balm, a bell rung in defiance of the silence that built me. And maybe this poem isn’t for you. Maybe it’s for the girl I used to be— the one who carved poems into her ribs just to feel something resonant.