The Weight Between Words

There is a language

my mouth has never learned,

though my heart has spoken it

in racing breaths,

in sleepless nights,

in the silence that follows

when someone asks,

"Are you okay?"

I carry ghosts

that wear familiar faces.

They do not rattle chains

they whisper memories,

soft enough to sound like truth,

loud enough to drown tomorrow.

PTSD is not the past.

It is the past

walking into the present

without knocking,

rearranging the room,

convincing me

the door is still locked.

People tell me,

"You can talk to me."

They do not see

the battlefield behind my teeth,

where every sentence

must survive the crossfire

before it ever reaches the light.

How do I explain

that my silence

is not emptiness,

but overcrowding?

That every memory

fights to be the first

to break me apart?

So I become

a museum of unspoken things,

placing velvet ropes

around broken pieces,

hoping no one

looks too closely.

Still

Somewhere beneath the rubble,

a quieter voice remains.

It does not promise

that healing is simple,

or that nightmares

forget my name.

It only whispers:

That surviving

was the first brave thing.

And perhaps,

one day,

telling the story

will be the second.