I learned my body in the cold forge of silence,
where love was a weapon, and the wound was mine to carry.
You taught me how to hold my breath
while your absence pressed itself into my bones—
a relentless tattoo,
a map of what I would never become.

Your voice was a fist—
your quiet, a sharper blade.
Every word was a verdict,
every glance, a guillotine,
and I learned to die in pieces,
small enough to fit inside your shadow.

At night, I swallowed your name like glass,
shards lining my throat,
cutting open all the lies I could not afford to believe.
I ran until my feet forgot the ground,
until the screams in my chest became a rhythm,
a hymn to the emptiness you left behind.

Who am I, but the daughter of droughts?
The child of cracked earth and barren prayers?
You taught me hunger—
the kind that devours its own mouth.
You taught me thirst—
an unending ache,
parched for a tenderness that never came.

But I am not your ruin.
Not your silence.
Not the bruise of your forgetting.
These hands, scarred and blistered,
are mine—
their strength shaped in the absence of your love.

You will not rise in me,
you will not bloom.
I carry your name like a wound I refuse to close,
like a truth too sharp to heal.
But still, I stand.
Still, I breathe.

I am the fire you could not extinguish,
the flood you could not drown.
I am the hunger that consumes its own shadow,
the storm that grows louder in the stillness.
No chains, no roots, no shame—
just the echo of my own voice,
a voice you tried to bury
but could not silence.

No mother, no tether, no guilt—
only this scar shaped like freedom,
and I wear it like armor.