I carry the weight of the past etched into the grooves along my neck.
Each scar is like an echo of the words that were stolen from me, and the whispers that turned into screams into the void. In my darkest moments, my voice was lost in a storm of abuse, with every act of cruelty another lash tightened around me, suffocating my breath, silencing my speech, stifling life.
I recall the struggle to keep my head held high, how the weight of a thousand unspoken words bent me. Every attempt at authentic expression was smothered, and with every enforced silence, the damage deepened, imprinting its mark on my flesh like a prison of shadow and silence.
Each line on my neck tells a story—a narrative of moments when my voice tried to surface from the depths of suppression only to be pushed back down. But even amid the relentless onslaught of muting and erasure, something within me persisted. A quiet, unyielding flame of resilience that refused to be extinguished, no matter how smothering the darkness. This flame eventually led me here, to a place of healing, where scars are read not as signs of defeat but as stanzas of enduring strength.
Here, they teach me to speak again, to unshackle the chains of fear and doubt that have held me captive. With each word that spills forth, with each unveiled truth, the scars on my neck, once a reminder of pain, now narrate a story of resilience and rebirth.