I am quiet. Not silent.
It might be hard to understand the difference, but there is one.
Believe me, this once.
I have spoken, screamed, begged, prayed, all of it raw and angry and loud, and it has been too unpalatable for digestion.
Ignored and left behind on plates.
The suffocation of having words lodged in your throat, words that choke you to swallow, choke you to try to speak, because they are horrible.
And then they dribble out of your mouth, leaving behind the foul taste of their wretched shapes, and the putrid stench of those horrible words makes heads turn away.
The words unheard, the wounds unseen.
Except neither of those are true, because I have spoken them within your hearing, I have shown them beneath your eyes.
So not unseen, not unheard, undigested and ignored for your own rotten convenience. Sometimes worse. Questioned and made less of.
I burn brighter than any pit in hell; rage hotter than 5,779 K searing me from the inside out.
The fire could peel me apart, my skin clawing away beneath my fingernails to expose the flames that would set all before me ablaze, the flames that are hidden beneath my bones.
And wouldn’t it be fair? For consequences to finally exist?
I am no longer the same, irrevocably different from that girl who might once have existed, who believed in fairness.
I am hate, and anger, sometimes only this red burning fury, no more. Red that crashes down upon me in unending waves that erode me further each time.
I swish it around in my mouth, considering the taste: defeat. Injustice I must make peace with, rather than repay. Because I can’t. How?
I spoke. You didn’t listen. You didn’t believe.
I feel like this is sort of melodramatic and imperfect, there are parts that clunk, but it was really true when I wrote it and it’s become sort of hard to change. I’d appreciate any feedback.