There once was a little girl born between silences and screams.
One was her mother’s, who held her children with one arm,
because in the other, she was tightly clutching God.
The other was her mother’s who no longer fit inside her own body
and who screamed, not at the little girl,
but at all the life hanging from her neck like a cross of lead.
The scream was the language of unspoken pain.
It shattered the air into pieces.
But the little one learned to gather it in her small palms
and swallow it,
so it wouldn’t hurt the others even more.
The screams never ended.
They hid in the walls, in the forks, between the bedsheets.
They turned into echoes, into wrinkles, into tics.
They were the chronicles of unloved love.
They were the longest chants
of a woman who had never been held.
And the little girl
lived between a silence that erased her
and a scream that frightened her.
So she chose the word.
She chose to write silent screams on paper.
To invent a new language
where fear and love could both fit, squeezed in, together.
The little girl
had a heart too big for the words she inherited.
So she tore them out.
From bare knees, from air, from labels stuck to her skin.
She wrote with her forehead, with her palms, with a tense chest,
as if each letter was a step toward life.
She was the first.
The first to dream of a path.
The first to leave with a small suitcase
and all the prayers of her younger siblings tucked between clothes.
Fourteen years old and a determination
older than all the women who had birthed her in silence.
Out in the world, she learned her roles like tight uniforms:
Sister, mother, father, woman, wife, saint, icon, mute.
She was loved with fear.
Touched by hands that never learned to say sorry.
And silence sat on her tongue like a too-heavy host.
But the fire in her words never died.
It burned slowly, like a candle forgotten in an old church.
Until one day,
she tore it all apart.
She tore the robe, the vow, the dogma,
and walked out of that life with scraped knees and letters.
Then she wrote.
She wrote to heal her thoughts,
her womb,
her heart,
her foremothers.
She loved again. But herself, first.
She placed her hand on her chest and said: “Home.”
She gave birth from herself to a temple of women.
Women who return to their voice,
who write with fury, with wounds, with truth,
and no longer ask permission to exist.
I am the little girl who wrote so she wouldn’t die.
The woman who writes to birth light.
The mother who writes not to disappear.
And the light that writes to meet yours too.
Once upon a time…
And I remained.
As a story. As a gate. As a prophecy.
