The firm chocolate wood I called my own,
The faint scars of age and play,
The peeling yellow I called my home,
is now a foundation of stranger colors.

Each step I take is now surrounded by foreign concrete,
and I will never know it like they will.
The fingerprints of my family stain this alien maze,
but mine are still blindly inside our gutted home.

Loved voices drown out my own,
leaving me frozen with my tongue cut out.
The constant supply of degrading phrases and looks
never fail to put me in my corner of white silence.

"Outsider," whispers the halls.

I was born into a house that doesn't want to hear me.
Have I always been this insignificant?
My safety blanket of peeling yellow only masked the pain that's been infinitely boiling.