For My Cousin
I love you.
And I will always choose you.
They call her messy.
They call her dumb.
As if words can erase what she survived.
Her life was rewritten too early,
not by choice, but by silence
that grew louder than truth.
They say, “forgive your parents, it’s their first time living too.”
But how do you teach forgiveness
to a child who had to survive her own home?
How do you ask her to forget
what was never supposed to happen?
We were both children once,
growing in different rooms,
but under the same shadow.
When she spoke, she was dismissed.
When I spoke, I was corrected in silence.
They told us to stay away from truth
but never away from the ones who caused it.
And now we are grown
still learning the shape of what happened to us,
still naming what they told us not to name.
We speak, and they call it “too much.”
We remember, and they call it “drama.”
But forgetting was never peace.
It was just their comfort.
And I refuse to confuse silence with healing.
Mar 26
Mar 26, 2026 at 4:03 PM UTC
For My Cousin
I love you.
And I will always choose you.
They call her messy.
They call her dumb.
As if words can erase what she survived.
Her life was rewritten too early,
not by choice, but by silence
that grew louder than truth.
They say, “forgive your parents, it’s their first time living too.”
But how do you teach forgiveness
to a child who had to survive her own home?
How do you ask her to forget
what was never supposed to happen?
We were both children once,
growing in different rooms,
but under the same shadow.
When she spoke, she was dismissed.
When I spoke, I was corrected in silence.
They told us to stay away from truth
but never away from the ones who caused it.
And now we are grown
still learning the shape of what happened to us,
still naming what they told us not to name.
We speak, and they call it “too much.”
We remember, and they call it “drama.”
But forgetting was never peace.
It was just their comfort.
And I refuse to confuse silence with healing.
For those of us who where told to forget. I chose to remember