For a Voice That Once Was Music
My soul is trapped. Unable to express itself through music, I can only suppress my rage, despair, and melancholy into the darkest recesses of my essence. Poison, sealed in a dainty glass heart. Isn't it so… the anguish of knowing, especially well, that you can’t do it? that you aren’t, weren't ever, will never be capable? that even when your peers look up to you, admire you… you’re just standing before an abyss? It’s all at once, too much, clawing its way into my essence… it’s too loud, too piercing, too sharp. a haunting melody slipping away just as I reach for it. The weight of not being able to say how I feel binds me like an overbearing shackle. I can’t breathe. I can’t let go. I can’t scream. I can’t be free. they don’t see the void. they don’t get it when I quietly confess to them. they don’t understand what I have to feel, They laugh. As if I were still whole. I’m not talented, not accomplished. not inspiring. I’m pathetic. Music used to be my voice. My sole coping mechanism against the darkness. Now it only pulls away from me, as if repulsed by something deep within me. notes crumble to ash on my fingertips. my soul swells, chokes, dies unspoken. it claws at its cage, bleeding, desperate— but I am the cage. my own hands; my own broken mind. my own reflection, smirking from the shadows. robbed, silenced, torn by invisible currents, and still... they praise me. They whisper I am capable. but if they looked closely, they’d see a girl. standing perfectly still, on the edge of screaming, mouth sewn shut with strings that were once meant for her music.