Brie Nicole Inked

I learned to fold. Too soon. Before I knew what I was losing. Loud into silence. Sharp into something dull enough to swallow. ‘Normal’ scraped down my throat, dry, necessary, wrong. But I kept forcing it down. Again. Again.

They didn’t ask me to disappear. Not directly. Just… be less. Less noise. Less feeling. Less everything that didn’t sit right in a room. So I obeyed in pieces. Cut the laugh short. Swallowed the thought. Let the moment die before it could become mine.

Now there are fragments of me everywhere. Half-sentences. Almost-words. The version of me that almost spoke. Still echoing, still unfinished. Didn’t. Didn’t. Didn’t.

I became almost. Always almost. Not enough to feel real, not gone enough to stop hurting. Just suspended somewhere in between. Breathing, but barely. Existing, but wrong.

The mirror; I don’t know who that is. It moves like me. Smiles when it should. Knows how to be seen. But behind it, something breaking. Something clawing, feral, furious, unrecognizable even to me.

Normal didn’t break me.
It erased me. Slow. Quiet. Careful.

Piece by piece, by piece, by piece. Until there was nothing left that hadn’t been traded away.

And now when I try to speak, my voice stutters, splinters, asks permission, like it still belongs to someone else.