Silence was once your refuge.
Now, it is her signature.
You wake unable to speak—not muted, but censored. Every attempt to vocalize is replaced with ellipses. Your lips move, but your words are marked [REDACTED] in the air. People look through you, as though awaiting an edit that never comes.
Then you begin to hear the Unsaid.
They live in margins you never annotated. In the gaps between your lines. They crawl through enjambments, nest inside parentheses, weep inside unspoken metaphors.
They are the words you never wrote.
The apologies you omitted.
The names you erased.
The silences you justified.
And they've turned against you.
Your phone rings with a voice composed entirely of things you never dared to articulate. Every "I should have" now has teeth. Every "if only" becomes a scream.
You try to write them down, trap them in prose.
But they refuse closure.
Because some stories weren't written to end.
They were written to haunt the author for choosing silence.
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